Cubii JR1 Review: Months of Seated Elliptical Use at Home

Four years ago I caught the toe of my boot on the back porch steps while carrying a bucket of potatoes, and I did not fall. I stood there with my heart going and my hands full and understood that the next time I might not be that lucky. I was 64 then, thirty-one years of walking a rural mail route behind me, and my doctor told me plainly that my legs and my balance were the problem, not my heart. He said the fix was not a pill. The fix was use.

That same week my daughter Karen, a nurse two hours away, sent me a link to the Cubii JR1 seated elliptical and told me to stop overthinking it. I bought one the month after the scare, which makes this the longest I have ever stuck with a piece of exercise equipment. It has lived under the small desk in the spare bedroom upstairs ever since, and on wet evenings I slide it in front of the recliner downstairs. Four years, most mornings, and it has never failed to turn over. Here is what that has looked like.

How I've Used It

Seated, always. I have never stood on it and I would not. The way it works is you sit in a chair, put your feet on the pedals, and turn them in a loop, and the loop runs eighteen inches at its longest. That is the entire thing. Fifteen to twenty minutes most mornings, five days a week, right after coffee and before I go out to the garden. I set it under the small desk so my hands have somewhere to rest and my back stays against the chair instead of curling forward.

The first month I ran it on level 2, which is close to nothing but gets the knee moving without an argument. I am on level 4 or 5 now depending on the morning. My right knee is the stiff one, old wear, no surgery, and damp weather still makes it grumble at me. On those mornings I drop back to 3 and nobody sends me a bill for it. That is the whole appeal of the knob. You can be a coward about it on a Tuesday and pick it back up on Wednesday.

I should tell you what I tried before, because it explains why this one stuck. The winter before I bought the Cubii, my nephew gave me a treadmill he no longer wanted. It went down in the cellar beside the furnace and I used it eleven times in four months. It was loud, and my knee ached for two days after each session from the landing, and by February it had a paint can and a bag of birdseed sitting on it. The second thing I tried was the recumbent bike at the community center, which was decent equipment and a forty minute round trip in the truck, and I quit going when the weather turned. The difference with the Cubii was not that it was better built. It was that it was nine steps from my bed.

Rainy evenings it comes downstairs and sits in front of the recliner. I put it there during the evening news and do ten slow minutes on level 3 while Joan reads in the other chair. It is quiet enough that she has never once told me to turn it down, which is more than she could say for the treadmill. On the mornings I do not feel like it, and there are plenty, the argument is settled before it starts, because the thing is already in the room and all I have to do is sit down and put my feet on it. That sounds like a small thing. It is the entire thing.

It weighs 25.4 pounds, so it is not a thing you toss around. I carry it with two hands and my knees bent, and I do not haul it up and down the stairs more than I have to. The footprint is 23.2 inches deep and 17.56 inches wide and ten inches tall. Measure your desk clearance before you buy, because a low desk and a ten inch machine is a bad pairing, and it is the one complaint I read from other buyers that I fully understand.

What the Eight Resistance Levels Actually Feel Like

Resistance is set by hand with a knob. There is no menu and no program to choose. You turn the knob, it clicks through eight positions, and that is your workout for the day. I like this more than I expected to. Nothing to charge, nothing to sync, nothing to figure out at six in the morning before the coffee has landed.

Level 1 is close to free spinning. Level 2 is where I started. Level 3 is a morning when the knee is talking. Level 4 and 5 are where I live now, and at 5 I can feel it in the front of my thighs and behind them by the ten minute mark. Level 6 is a short burst. Level 8 I have done twice, about ninety seconds each time, out of curiosity and stubbornness, and I would not call it pleasant.

People ask how I knew when to move up. I did not know. I moved up when the level I was on stopped being work in the last five minutes and started being coasting. That is the signal, and it took about five weeks to arrive the first time. Then you turn the knob one click and watch the next three mornings. If the knee complains on the second morning, you turn it back and wait another month, and nothing bad happens. I have gone backward as often as forward over four years and it has never cost me a thing except a little pride.

What the machine does not do is make you breathe hard. If you want to be winded, this is not the tool and I will not pretend it is. What it does is keep the joint moving, keep the muscles in the habit of working, and let me do it while reading the seed catalog instead of driving somewhere to do it. For a man whose main goal is getting up off a garden kneeler without a hand on the fence, that is the whole job.

The Display, the Battery, and the App I Never Open

There is a small LCD screen set into the top that tracks calories burned, time and strides. I watch the stride count and the clock. I do not put much stock in the calorie number, not because it is wrong but because I do not care, and I would rather watch minutes than a figure that flatters me.

It runs on batteries. I have changed them a handful of times in four years and I honestly could not tell you the month of the last swap, which is the highest compliment I can pay a battery compartment. No cord across the spare bedroom floor, no outlet to hunt for, nothing to trip over in the dark on the way to bed.

The first time the screen went blank mid-stride I thought the machine had quit on me. I was about four minutes in on a Tuesday, and I sat there feeling foolish for a good while before it occurred to me to open the compartment and look. Fresh batteries and it came right back, and it has done that to me twice more since, always the same way, always with no warning. That is the entire maintenance history of the electronics. I keep a spare pair in the desk drawer now so the interruption costs me two minutes instead of a week of not bothering.

Cubii also makes a phone app, and the way it works is that you type your numbers in from the display by hand. I have never once done it. Karen asked me about it a year in and I told her I write the minutes on the calendar by the stairs like a civilized man. If tracking on a phone matters to you, it is there. Understand that you are the one doing the entering, not the machine.

Four Years Later: What Still Works and What Wore

Nothing has broken. Not the pedals, not the knob, not the screen. The thing has been sat on, slid across a wood floor, carried down a staircase and back up again, and the pedals still turn with the same smoothness they had the first morning. I have not tightened a bolt or put a drop of anything on it.

The wear is in the room, not the machine. There is a scuff on the floorboards where the front feet sit. The seat of the wooden chair I use is shinier than it was. My habit of leaving a glass of water on the desk and reaching for it mid-stride has cost me exactly one glass, and Joan still brings it up at Thanksgiving.

There is one thing I would do differently. For the first two years it lived on the back porch from April to October and came inside for the cold months, and hauling 25 pounds up and down a staircase twice a year is how I learned to carry it with my knees bent and my back straight. Now it stays in the spare bedroom year round. In good weather I take my ten minutes on the porch without it and save myself the lifting. Twice a year Joan makes me wipe the housing down with a damp rag and I run the vacuum over the boards where it sits. That is the sum of the care it has needed in four years.

The honest limitation is that it does not fold and it does not hide. It is a 25 pound piece of metal and plastic that takes up a patch of floor and stays there. If your house has no corner for it, you will quit using it inside a month, and that is true of every piece of home equipment I have ever owned, including two I gave to the church.

Four years, five mornings a week, and the only thing I have replaced is the batteries.

How It Fits With the Rest of My Routine

The Cubii is the first thing I do, not the only thing. I follow it with a few minutes of band work in a sturdy kitchen chair, rows and chest presses and shoulder work, using THERABAND flat bands that hang on a hook behind the spare bedroom door. Twice a week I add Sportneer ankle weights for seated leg extensions. The ProsourceFit balance pad stays flat on the floor by the dresser for standing balance work with one hand on the furniture, and in summer it comes outside as my garden kneeler, which is my favorite use for it by a wide margin.

The pattern matters more than any single piece. The elliptical loosens the knee, the bands keep the upper body from going soft, the pad keeps the ankles honest, and the garden gives all of it a reason to exist. None of it is complicated and none of it took a trainer to figure out. If you are starting from nothing, I would get the seated machine first, because it is the one you can do while half asleep and in socks.

Who This Is For

This is for the person who has been told to move more and has nowhere to do it. The one with a stiff knee, a sore back in the mornings, a set of porch steps that suddenly look taller than they used to. It is for somebody who will not join a gym at 68 and does not want to be talked into one. If you can sit in a chair for twenty minutes and turn your feet in a circle, you can use this, and you can start tomorrow without buying anything else.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you weigh more than 150 pounds, because the manufacturer lists that as the maximum and I would not argue with them about it. Skip it if what you want is to be out of breath, because this will not do that and you will be disappointed by week two. Skip it if you have no floor space you are willing to give up permanently, or if your doctor has told you to avoid bending your knee under load, or if you want a machine that counts your work for you without you typing it in. And check with your doctor or a physical therapist before you start anything new, the way I did, because the machine does not know your knee and they do.