Compact Folding Exercise Bench for Small Apartments
A home workout bench engineered to fold flat and offer three heights — stability, leg geometry and pin adjustment resolved for a market the standard gym bench ignores.
Most exercise benches are designed for gyms: long, black, industrial and too large for a flat. This client wanted the opposite — a bench that folds away and does not look like equipment when it does not need to.
The problem
Shortening a bench and folding its legs both attack the same property: stability. A bench is a lever with a person on top of it, and every metre removed from the footprint costs resistance to tipping.
Three requirements stacked on that:
- Two clean states — closed with legs folded in for storage, open and stable for use — with nothing fiddly in between.
- Three height options, ideally by changing the effective leg length rather than adding a separate mechanism.
- A domestic appearance: softer forms, not gym black.
The approach
- Footprint over height. The open leg geometry was set to recover the stability lost to the shorter body, splaying the contact points rather than relying on mass.
- Captive adjustment pins. The height pins stay attached during adjustment instead of coming fully out — a small decision that removes the most common way a user loses a part and the most common pinch hazard.
- Fold path checked for interference across all three heights, so no combination of settings leaves the legs unable to close.
- Form developed alongside the structure, so the softer domestic look came from the actual section shapes rather than from covers added afterwards.
The result
A full CAD design with exploded views and STEP/STL deliverables for prototyping and manufacture, developed across three iterations with the founder.
Where this applies
Furniture and equipment that must fold, adjust and still be trusted with body weight. Stability, adjustment and storage each want a different geometry — the job is finding the one shape that serves all three.
I design consumer hardware for production: mechanism, structure, DFM and the drawing package. Request a quote or see all services.