Exercise equipment burns my feelings
The two things I recently learned while watching television on the couch was that it’s a new year, there’s a lot of furniture sales, I’m severely out of shape, there’s a lot of exercise equipment for sale and I’m not good at counting.
It seems there’s always some totally new piece of home exercise equipment going on the market every year.
That baffles me because when you think about our cumulative years of health, medicine, physiology and science, you’d think we’d have the perfect piece of exercise equipment as well as have figured out how to operate televisions with mind control.
After seeing three workout commercials during the New Year’s Day “Twilight Zone” marathon — the only marathon in which I have ever participated — I realized that it’s not about getting into shape but seeing how far people will go and how much they’ll spend to look ridiculous.
As an example, let’s take a look at the few of the more popular home exercises pieces of equipment in the recent history of home exercise equipment.
The latest is a workout board, which is basically a skateboard you stand on and twist your body back and forth, like you’re trying to wring the fat out of your system. If you’re lazy and poor like me, you can always stand in a washing machine and get the same results, but just make sure you finish your workout before the spin cycle.
There’s the resistance bands, which are rubber bands that you attach to the wall or attach to yourself and stretch so you look like you’re stuck in the Bubble Gum Hall of Horrors at Willy Wonka’s factory. That’s where the bad Oompa Loompas go after licking too many snozberries off the wall on company time.
Finally, there’s the step-aerobics step, which is another word for a step stool for which you paid $70 to eventually only use as a household step stool that costs $70. Put it next to your treadmill that’s now a $1,000 clothes rack and your exercise bike that’s now a dusty $200 last-resort spare chair when you have over-invited people to your house.
So, I can’t help to wonder what the real research and development that went into some of these things.
They would make you think they took time consulting doctors, personal trainers, NASA scientists, engineers, shamans, architects, Vegas odds makers, historians, leprechauns and meteorologists to come up with an exercise that is state-of-the-art gold standard.
And the sad reality is the designers were probably drunk at a Dave and Busters while playing the whack-a-mole game when they had the inspiration for the latest exercise craze.
“I got it! Listen! We make them hit themselves in the head with a barbell pillow, and we tell them it’s what gladiators did to get in shape before a match and — no, I’m not drunk, Debbie!!! — and we, we tell them that it strengthens their core! We don’t even know what a core is! Hahahaaa!”
So, knowing that information that I just made up for this column, you can only imagine how infuriating it is to those commercials interrupting my annual New Year’s hangover, pork sauerkraut coma and TV binge.
I became so furious that I just wanted to turn the channel, but the remote is way, way over on the other side of the couch, so I’ll just have to wait for mind-reading technology to catch up to the next new year.