I saw a commercial last night for this exercise machine from Bowflex.
It is like a treadmill split in half. Step with your right foot, the fron of the right tread lifts and it falls as your foot slides back. Step with your left, same thing.
Watching the commercial, though, I couldn’t see how this would benefit you any more than a treadmill set at an incline. I could be wrong! I’m no expert. And compared to some of the machines I’ve seen advertised, it was a thing of beauty.
So do any of the machines they advertise on TV actually work? I mean, work roughly as advertised?
Has anyone bought a machine advertised on TV? What were your experiences?
My sister bought the Ab Scissor, and the Cardio Cruiser, both body by Jake. They work pretty good, but didn’t quite deliver the 3 pants size loss they promised…
The question isn’t so much whether it will get you working hard enough to burn calories, but whether you’ll stick with it long enough to see any benefit. There are a finite number of ways you can run/jog/climb/ski/slide/whatever, and they’re constantly coming up with new ways to engineer a machine that’ll get you to do that exercise. All motions don’t work for all people.
Of course, there’s also just plain running/jogging/climbing/skiing/sliding/whatever that you can do, without the benefits of modern engineering, but most people have some hefty rationalizations that keep them from doing it.
Spending money on a machine like this is enough to get some people to exercise (“hey, I paid for it, I’m gonna use it!”). My wife, on the other hand, has four exercycles, two ab roller thingies, two trampolines and a bike. She doesn’t use any of it.
I had a friend who bought an “Ab Doer” (W…T… flying…F), joke of a name aside, she swore by the thing, said it was fun to use, and that she barely felt like she was exercising - until she stopped, of course.
She did lose a lot of weight after buying it, I saw that much with my own eyes - I don’t know if it helped her get rock hard abs or anything, but it at least, outwardly, appeared to work.
Stupidest name in the history of exercise machines, though, IMO. :smack:
That looks like an elliptical machine to me, and yes, they work. But the secret is, you actually have to use them on a regular basis. I think that’s the fatal flaw in buying equipment for the home, you just aren’t going to be motivated to use it.
I had my AbSlide for three years before I used it. And the way I started was by bringing it into work and using it my cube. Now I do 100 a day.