ANCORE Pro Review – Better Than A Cable Machine In 2026?

Not much rounds out a gym like a good cable machine. Historically they have been fairly large, eating up precious real estate in your home gym. Add in that items like my Inspire FT2 cost well over $4k, and you start to question the validity of adding such a piece to your space. Fret no more, because the ANCORE PRO brings us a cable machine the size of a foot long subway sandwich, and at a quarter of the price of some of the competition.

The question is… Is the 65lb of resistance enough for most lifters? Or will this be a short stop on the way towards buying the real thing?

Transparency Note

I messaged the ANCORE team a week before heading to HomeGymCon 2025 over on Instagram and told them I was going to stop bye their booth. We spent a good hour there, and ended the discussion with them interested in a review. Oh, and I wore my VOLTRA Cult shirt during the chat.

The ANCORE Pro was sent to us for free, for sake of review. They also provided us with a discount code and an affiliate link. If you decide to purchase an ANCORE Pro after this article, those will save YOU some cash while giving me a small kick back, helping me to keep doing my thing throughout the home gym community.

Obviously, my hope is that none of that impacts my judgment and feedback, but keep all of that in mind as we go. I appreciate your support, let’s dig in.

Background

After finishing my 1 year review on the Beyond Power VOLTRA I’s, I got a lot of questions about how it compared to the ANCORE Pro. The VOLTRA is awesome, but the price tag is over $2000. It has a lot of cool features, but sometimes you just want to lift. And you need access to power at some point to charge, which can be a pain.

I also used the SHOGUN Flex units. They weren’t a great fit for our space, but they were super portable and had some unique features. We’ve used the Inspire FT2, Powertec Levergym, ForceUSA Tandem Tower, Ironmaster Super Bench Pro V2 with the Cable Tower attachment, and many more options for cable machines.

The ANCORE PRO clocks in at about 30% of the VOLTRAs, and the price of two FLEXs. It removes the battery constraints as there is NO power needed. And it has a max of 65lbs of resistance. It is WAY smaller than any of the other dedicated cable machines we have used. So it fits neatly in a unique box of no battery but portable.

ANCORE Pro Overview

The ANCORE PRO is touted as a commercial grade cable machine for a fraction of the price and space. They hand assemble these in Boston in the US, and ship them out to a number of professional sports teams including every single NHL team, Basketball G League, and over 100 college sports programs.

The base unit is 5lbs of resistance, and comes with 5lb and 10lb plates to bring it up to 65lbs in 5lb increments. The plates attach and remove in a twist fashion, set aside when not in use, and overall take up almost no space. Remember, there is no digital resistance, power requirement, or anything like that. So the system is fairly simple in concept and application.

The complete kit weights 9lbs, which means that you can take the 65lb kit with you anywhere with ease. Add in the travel case and strap, and you’ve got a fully portable cable machine for traveling to the park, going on vacation, or training people remotely. Or you know, just being able to store out of the way in your home gym.

ANCORE Pro Specs

• Brand: ANCORE
• Made In USA: No, but fully designed and assembled in the US
• Power Required: None
• Dimensions: 12 in x 4.75 in x 3 in (fully loaded)
• Total Weight Capacity: 65lbs w/ the Plus Upgrade
• Weight: 9lbs
• Cable Length: 8ft
• Warranty: Check here
• Return Window: 30 Days
• Frame Materials: Machined Metal
• Assembly: None

ANCORE Pro Shipping & Assembly

The ANCORE Pro comes in a nice clean black box, with premium black foam inserts. Everything is well packaged, and there is a VERY small likelihood that anything would end up damaged in delivery.

The ANCORE Pro also doesn’t require any assembly. Just take it out of the box, toss the materials, attach to your location of choice, and you are off!

ANCORE Pro Features

The ANCORE Pro, yes, it is pronounced ANCORE, like on a boat. The ANCORE PRO without anything attached to it, measures in at just 4.5in wide, 5in deep, and 3.5in tall and weighs just over 2.5lbs. That housing contains the full cable and the spring mechanism inside that makes the entire thing work. You’ve got about 8ft worth of cable to work with, that winds up inside the housing. BUT, the housing itself without any additions, only has 5lb of resistance. You twist on the resistance discs, that are marked for 2.5lb, 5lb and 10lb increments, and you can jump up to 65lb.

The ANCORE Pro has a number of dock and mounting solutions, whether we are looking at the off-shelf from ANCORE stuff, or third-party offerings like DARKO and EVE Company.

A cool feature on the ANCORE Pro is the rollers on the inside of the unit, which help reduce wear and tear on the cable itself. There are two recessed rollers on the inside but the main rollers to keep the cable healthy are on the top and bottom side of the ANCORE Pro.

From there, you attach your cable attachment of choice and get to work.

ANCORE Pro Performance

Overall, this thing functions very similarly to a cable machine. There are some items I’ll note below that change that, but if you had an average person use this side by side anything else, they probably wouldn’t be able to immediately pin-point the differences. Where the ANCORE Pro differs from a more traditional cable machine, is going to be in the size and resistance. So lets dig into those.

Weights

I was shipped SIX of the 10s, TWO of the 5s, plus the 5lb base, which would add up to 75lbs. The team confirmed that 65lbs is the max, they simply provide an additional set of discs to get to the 65lbs easier. I did read some comments from some people that they might have loaded their ANCORE Pro up passed that 65lb limit. But from a warranty stance, that is not recommended.

You can tinker around with what the community calls Pulley Magic, or the 1:2 ratio hack, where you can leverage physics, an extra pulley, and double any weight on the ANCORE Pro up to 130lbs.

The resistance discs, while fairly straight forward, have some hiccups. First, I’m not a fan of the fact that they have to be labelled Right and Left. That might seem like a small nuisance, but part of the ANCOREs charm is supposed to be the simplicity. Every small hiccup in execution leaves a little wrinkle in that. I don’t have the 2.5lb disc, and I think you absolutely should buy it. In fact I kind of wish they had 1lb weights. The VOLTRAs adjust in 1lb increments, and for certain exercises like lateral raises, or especially for smaller athletes, this can be the difference between being able to make progress and not.

By the way, this is another potential wrinkle in the ANCORE Pro. When we use the VOLTRAs with our younger lifters, they can easily see the weight they are lifting, because its digital. No math required. The ANCORE Pro is a little more work.

And adjusting between multiple lifters, assuming not everyone is using the same resistance, is a bit finicky. It requires you to take on and off the discs as needed, and sometimes you want to take off just one and multiple come off.

The other consideration is what to do with these discs when they aren’t in use. We have been keeping them on the storage shelf on the PowerBlock cart, but you are going to need to figure out where these live that is easily accessible but not in the way.

Resistance Profile

The ANCORE Pro is a 1:1 weight ratio, in that 65lbs loaded up in discs, is 65lbs of resistance… Well, kind of. Fair warning, we are about to do some math…

The beginning of the rep is fairly light, with the felt resistance increasing as the cable gets longer due to the spring mechanism inside. If we load 10lbs of discs, the rep starts somewhere around 5lb of felt weight. If we load 65lb, we are sitting around 32lb… which tells me that we are sitting at about a 50% felt weight to start the rep.

To get the felt weight resistance to match what is loaded on the ANCORE, required me to get about 6ft away from the unit. If we look at this in a real-world situation, I loaded 20lbs for curls, and got 14lbs at the very top of my rep, so about 70% of what it claims to be.

This gives me concern for two reasons…

First, 65lbs max load, for a lot of exercises, is not enough. And if the actual felt resistance is more like 70% of what it claims for most exercises, we are talking more like 45lbs of max resistance for a lot of typical movements in the gym. Now, if we do the double the weight hack, this actually fixes some of this, because it uses twice the length of the cable for the same movement.

So that same 20lb curl, gets me to 34lbs of felt weight with the pulley magic. For a longer range of motion exercise like maybe a pulldown or seated row, we’ll start to be looking at really close to a true 2x felt weight to claimed weight resistance.

You can adjust where you mount the ANCORE Pro or how far away you stand from it to try and modify this, but that won’t work for every exercise, and now we are requiring multiple modifications to what is meant to be a simple piece of gym equipment.

The second reason why this might be an issue, is around the strength profile of most exercises and how our body works. We are typically strongest in the lengthened position of a muscle, and we are the weakest in the shortened position of a muscle. With the resistance profile of the ANCORE Pro, it is the lightest when we are the strongest, and the heaviest when we are the weakest. Not ideal.

And considering how more information lately has pointed to biasing the lengthened position for hypertrophy purposes, this is likely leaving some gains on the table.

Mounts

Right now, we actually ONLY have the strap mount, and with a little creativity can mount it to the rack securely, our Powerblock stand, I’ve had a friend borrow it and secure inside their house…

Anything between 10 and 14 inches in diameter would be ideal… Less than 10 inches and you’ll have to figure out what to do with the extra material, but it will still work. Anything more than 14 inches and there is no Velcro, so you are stuck. So larger trees and poles won’t work. You can get a custom one ordered from ANCORE by the way. With the strap mount and some creativity, you can bob and weave between curls, triceps extensions, to rotational work fairly quickly.

If you owned multiple mounts, you could easily jump between stations, move this in and out of the way in a busy home gym setting, all fairly easily due to the portability of it. You can mount it both horizontally and vertically on most mounts, but keep in mind, as the weight goes up, this thing starts to eat up more space. So you’ll need to factor that into wherever you plan to mount it.

You also want to choose your orientation based on what you are doing. I mentioned the rollers before, you want to ideally keep the larger outer rollers in line with whatever you are doing. So horizontally is great for triceps extensions, curls, anything pulling straight out or up and down.

If you plan to do a movement that would put some lateral play into the mix, maybe a wide flye for instance. You’ll want to mount this vertically so the cable travels over the rollers and doesn’t run into the body. Just to be safe.

Smart Features

ANCORE recently released some new features for data driven analytics. I do not have those, and personally that part of the equation isn’t that important to me.

But, if you are interested in that, my dude Kurt from The KurtLocker went through that portion in his review, which you can watch above.

Should You Buy The ANCORE Pro?

The ANCORE Pro is unique, and can bob and weave between being the perfect solution for some, and a downright waste of time for others. So we are going to break this down by a few different types of people.

Fully Decked Out Home Gym Owner

One of the best things about a piece like the ANCORE Pro, is its space saving abilities, and its ability to be mounted anywhere in the home gym.

But our VOLTRAs get used for belt squats, back extensions, every cable movement we do, as well as customizing the strength curve, mimicking a rower… People are connecting them to plate loaded machines, and this is all because of several unique features like the cable length adjustments, auto load and deload features, the 200lb of resistance and even being able to turn on and off the resistance with the app.

If I take a look at all the exercises I do in my gym, for my own workouts, the ANCORE Pro is going to be able to do a few shoulder exercises, some forearm work, and that is about it. My wife recently belt squatted 155lbs for reps with our VOLTRAs. She is doing 100lbs for Cable RDLs, 75lbs for reps on seated rows and pulldowns… My daughter, who is 9 years old, does seated rows with 35lbs for 15 rep sets. Now she is a monster, but if we dropped that rep range down to about 5 reps, we’d be damn near maxing out the ANCORE Pro with a 9-year-old.

While the ANCORE Pro does come in at almost 1/3 of the price of a VOLTRA, in a gym like mine, even with multiple athletes, it just doesn’t tick enough boxes to be a suitable competitor.

The BEST Cable Machines For Your Garage Gym – 2026

If the VOLTRA is too expensive, we have a wide variety of space friendly cable solutions like the Revolt Fitness Pulley System or the Bullet Pulley, all the way up to the Dialed Motion IBEX and PRX Profile Pro Functional Trainer. Even a standalone cable tower from Bells of Steel. All of these are cheaper than a single ANCORE Pro, won’t have the same weight restrictions, and are probably better additions to a more typical full-fledged home gym.

To drill it home just a little further, Eric Cressey who runs one of the worlds best Baseball Sports Performance Gyms on the planet, has a number of ANCORE Pros that they use with their athletes. But they ALSO have an entire lineup of functional trainers and other cable machines. So even in a sports performance specific studio, it just isn’t enough to be the only option.

Vacation & Travel Purposes

When me and my family travel, I don’t workout. Vacations are too expensive for me to dedicate time on the road to workouts. So take this section with a grain of salt as someone who would never travel with the ANCORE Pro.

The ANCORE Pro is light enough, can be contained in a travel kit, and can pass through TSA without any issues. However, that is going to be limited to the unit itself, the 65lbs of resistance, a single D-Handle, and the strap mount.

You are going to need to get creative with your mounting to get a full body workout here. In a typical hotel room, you might not have many options for the strap mount that are secure enough. And remember, depending on your strength level, that 65lbs of resistance is your ENTIRE workout.

A set of bands from Living.Fit is $80, has options as low as about 10lbs, up to bands about 250lbs. When I got mine, they came with a door anchor, toss it all in a baggie, and you are good to go. If we are talking vacation workouts, I’d take a hotel gym first, and then take bands for mobility work, various exercises, a higher resistance profile, and ease of use over the ANCORE Pro.

Coaches

I coach a couple of my daughters’ sports teams, and one item we are actively adding in to practices is strength training. At younger ages, we can easily challenge kids with bodyweight squats, lunges, push-ups and planks. Add in a sled and and some medicine balls for carries, pushes, sprints, and more, and we are pretty dang close. But if I wanted to add a little more to their workouts, maybe some rotational work or rows, I’d look elsewhere.

Kids Lifting

As much as I love my VOLTRAs, I’m probably not hauling them to the local soccer field to have a group of 9-year-olds tinker with them. Especially not if it is raining, or maybe close to 100 degrees outside. I don’t think the VOLTRAs would like any of that. The Shogun FLEX and other units in this realm have the same tech limitations as the VOLTRAs when it comes to outdoor environments, AND they require an app to function. Even at half the price of an ANCORE, trying to set them up and let a group of 9-year-olds manage my phone is… not ideal.

But the ANCORE Pro would fit in well. Find a suitable poll to strap it around, or even strap it on the sled, and we can train row variations, rotational work, and balance out our strength training routine, without worrying about a battery, overheating, getting wet, or anything else.

You could go back to the band solution, but I think the ANCORE is a bit more elegant here in terms of set-up and function.

ULTRA Small Home Gyms

If you have a gym like mine, there are just too many other options on the market for me to recommend the ANCORE Pro. But there is one variant of a home gym where I think the ANCORE Pro actually makes perfect sense. If something like the above is your entire home gym. We can store on this single Adjustable Dumbbell stand…

A set of 5 to 100lb PowerBlock Pro 100 EXPs, a Freak Athlete Adjustable Kettlebell, the ANCORE Pro, all of the weight discs, and even some cable attachments and accessories. Roll a vertical storage bench up to it like the REP Nighthawk, and in a combination that would fit in a small closet, you’ve got a pretty power packed gym.

In this scenario, I’d 100% take the ANCORE Pro over the VOLTRAs as it is simpler, doesn’t require charging, and the nuances of the resistance profile, even the max resistance of the ANCORE Pro, probably won’t be a huge factor. Plus, for the cost of a VOLTRA you can basically get this entire set-up.

It wins over the Shogun FLEX and other options for similar reasons. And it wins over any other cable unit, because it is self-sustaining right here, in a small space, that is completely portable from storage to in use, and back.

Wrap Up

The ANCORE Pro is not a winner in my home gym. The VOLTRA and dedicated cable machines are all going to offer more resistance, exercises, and options than the ANCORE Pro can. But having it sit on my PowerBlock Cart for the past couple months completely changed my perspective of what this thing could be used for. If I moved into an apartment tomorrow, I’d snag a cart and strap the ANCORE Pro onto that bad boy and be cooking!

💲Want to buy an ANCORE Pro? Use this link and Code: GML to save $60 on your order.