The Back Attack™

The Back Attack is Sorinex’s dedicated hip-hinge machine — a hinge pattern similar to a Good Morning or standing back extension, but with the bar replaced by independent plate-loaded arms and a fixed torso position. Because the load path stays compressive (straight down the spine) instead of the shear/tangential loading a barbell Good Morning puts on the lower back, it lets lifters and athletes load hip extension hard without a bar on their shoulders. A patent-pending dual-load variable lets a coach shift resistance toward the bottom, the top, or both, and the current production unit — Gen 3, confirmed by Sorinex staff at a 2023 trade-show demo — has a smaller footprint (82”W x 82”H x 51”D), a full/flat back pad spanning the shoulders instead of the older round pad, two full structural arms instead of one primary arm plus a secondary arm, and a 4-way hole pattern for Sorinex’s Encore attachment system. It’s plate-loaded (user-supplied Olympic plates) with band pegs for accommodating resistance, and it’s hand-crafted to order with a 10-12 week lead time.

Real-world signal backs up the design. Bert Sorin himself, in an interview with independent strength coach Judd Lienhard, jokes the machine “should really be called the glute-ham attack” since load lands on the glutes and hamstrings more than the low back, which mostly stabilizes; he pitches it as a fast, low-coaching-overhead way to teach hip-hinge patterns to athletes who have never safely done a Good Morning. On GymRadar, two gym owners rate it 4.84/5 (Performance and Build Quality both 5/5): one calls it a way to “work your low back without loading your spine,” the other notes strongman Brian Shaw broke the older v1 unit under heavy use and had it reinforced — which lines up with Sorinex’s own claim of a 225% load-capacity increase in the current generation. Community chatter is thin but consistent: one r/homegym commenter calls it flatly “amazing,” another the “actual machine to get.”

The trade-offs are real. This is a single-purpose machine — Bert Sorin himself frames it as doing “one very important thing” (hip extension) rather than a multi-station tool — with an 82” x 82” footprint that a different Reddit commenter flags as “huge, arrogant and only good for one thing.” At $4,999 plus a 10-12 week build time, it’s a commercial-gym purchase, and independent long-form review coverage is thin: Garage Gym Reviews only lists it in their equipment database (no full test), and GymRadar’s rating rests on just two reviews. Buyers should also watch for unbranded replicas: Sorinex staff and r/homegym threads both confirm independent builders sell “back attack” copies (around $300-350 on Facebook Marketplace) that are not genuine Sorinex machines. One more note on sourcing: Alan Thrall’s popular video reviews a secondhand, older-generation unit with a round back pad and a “zero tension at lockout” quirk he worked around with a DIY resistance band — that’s a discontinued design, not a defect in the current Gen 3 machine described above.