A lot of the dumb shit people waste money on is fitness or health related. Magic diet pills, magnetic “chi-balancing” junk, ionic necklaces, exotic exercise machines, etc. My vote for absolute stupidity goes to fad items though. Anyone who bought a pet rock or tamagotchi, much less fought over a Cabbage Patch doll with other fanatical morons deserves as much scorn as possible heaped upon their pointy little heads.
The machine is stupidly expensive, but the idea isn’t all that out there. Sprinters and other short-duration high-intensity athletes don’t do much long distance training. Their longest single effort is usually under 5 minutes, but they easily outperform marathon runners in strength, and have lower body fat and more muscle.
On the other hand, with a pullup bar, an olympic barbell, and maybe some dumbbells you could do more varied conditioning for less than $2,000. And that’s assuming you buy all the equipment yourself instead of sharing the costs at a gym.
They’re literally poster-children for the training protocol promoted by Crossfit. Most workouts are under 20 minutes, and there are few cardio-only training sessions. I don’t belong to any of their gyms (no franchises here in Japan) but I’ve been using their training recommendations — which are provided for free on the website — for about a year. Two words: kick ass. I can run faster and farther, I’m much, much stronger, and I’ve probably got lower body fat than I’ve had for many years. Some of my workouts are only 10 minutes long, if you don’t count warmup or stretching.
Which twin has the neuticles?
On the subject of fad items, I can understand buying them if you just happen to like them (I owned a Rubik’s Cube and what-not), but people who paid hundreds and later thousands of dollars for Beanie Babies were the ones who blew my mind. I remember thinking at the time this was our equivalent of the Dutch Tulip Mania, and sure enough the $2,000 Beanie Babe is now back to however much you can get for it (which will probably have at least two less zeroes).
For you young’uns, Pet Rocks were marketed to stupid people with too much money in the mid 1970s. They were rocks wrapped in a little box and you could teach them tricks like…play dead. Ha ha, very funny. But the joke was on the damn fool who paid upwards of $5.00 (about twice the minimum wage) to make some clever SOB a millionaire.
Basically, it’s a stair stepper, but with really tall steps. Like if you were trying to climb God’s staircase. The arm motion bit is the same idea. Really wide movements.
Their argument runs like this: oxygen consumption THE way of measuring the cardio effect of an exercise during the exercise. Our machine works lots of muscles at once, making the oxygen consumption really high. Because the oxygen consumption is so high, you achieve the same amount of oxygen burned as a traditional workout, but in less time. Therefore, you receive the SAME LONG-TERM benefits.
In reality, you just so overtax yourself that you outstrip the capacity of your heart and lungs to deliver oxygen very quickly. You walk away feeling like you just mountain-climbed your pudgy chip-eating self up Everest, and presume that you’ve had an awesome workout.
My cellular biology is rusty, but I can’t imagine that simply temporarily depleting the glucagon stores in the muscle is enough to stimulate myofibril production, or mitochondrial replicaiton, or vascular collagen composition, or any of the other cellular measures of cardiovascular strength.
They are frickin’ CZs, but they never just come out and say that. They dance around the issue like crazy, though. You can get CZs WAY cheaper at your local department store - without the prestigious “DiamondAura” name, though. :rolleyes:
Not a product, but the commercials (usually run at night) prompting me to put my unwanted or scrap gold in an envelope, and mail it away for cash.
They still run the ads, so there must be people sending them gold. I wonder if the people who’ve been ripped off are too embarassed to take legal action.
Wait, what? Really? Why didn’t I think of that? I can sort of understand the exercise equipment and magic crystals and stuff. That’s what fantasies are made of. But putting your unwanted gold (who has unwanted gold laying around, anyway?) in the mail? Perhaps we are all doomed, after all.
When I retire I want to work for one of these papers as a reporter. That has got to be a fun job, you sit on the beach, have a few margaritas and then just start making stuff up.
Not very, apparently. My favorite Weekly World News cover featured a picture of what purported to be the dead body of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVie, who had been scheduled for execution that very week. Emphasis on the words “had been scheduled for.” The execution was delayed, and McVie was very much alive at the time the issue graced the checkout aisles of my local grocery store.
It’s just not the same since Weekly World News went out of business.
I was a sprint distance swimmer. Sprinters might not go for a long time in a single continuous effort, but you do it more than 5 minutes worth, believe me. And the ROM’s big selling point is that you get a complete workout in exactly 4 minutes.
I know someone who got into the Weekly World News. Their tale of escaping twelve-foot waves on Lake Erie during a freak storm was true enough. The water monsters were a complete fabrication.
Did you see the video at the end of the page with the normal-looking umbrella that flexes in, so you don’t collide umbrella tips with another person? Genius!
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