If You Can Sit, You Can Get Fit: The Hawaii Chair

For this one, we almost don’t need to comment on anything. Isn’t it ridiculous enough as it is? Who in his right mind would want to purchase a chair that moves like an out-of-control Lazy Susan? This by far is lazier and worse than the Flex Belt and Contour! At least with those ab machines you could do other things while wearing them, but you can’t do anything at all on the Hawaii Chair!

The above video, while short, is filled to the brim with bad acting and unconvincing lines. To go through them all would be redundant and painful. For that reason we are not going to spend this post on that video but the video on the website. Trust us, you will want to take a look at the website.

Now the Hawaii Chair claims that it goes 2,800 revolutions per minute and either weighs or could handle 300 pounds—it isn’t clear from the wording. But why does it make that claim aside from the fact that it wants to wow viewers into purchasing this $300 contraption? What does it mean to go 2,800 RPMs? Could you do 2,800 hula-like motions in one minute? Would anyone want to do that and probably suffer an extreme form of whiplash? It’s also interesting that they call the motor for the chair a “Hula Motor,” as if the motor was specifically designed to do the hula and not just spin around.

Now there is a specific demographic targeted in the video on the website: old people. The narrator, who sounds as if he only learned to read English, states: “Old men can use the Hawaii Chair easily to help improve the operation of the digestive [and here he stutters and mispronounces the word “digestive”] and cardiovascular systems.” Of course, while the narrator is talking about old men, the video shows a bunch of old women using the Hawaii Chair. The wording sounds like a translation from another language. An American-based company will never be so direct as to use the word “old” when targeting old people.

Then we get some good old fashioned name-dropping. Dr. Fredericks, who decided that his M.D. or Ph.D. degree warranted the study of the laziest ab machine ever contrived, apparently ran some “scientific experiments” that produced amazing results. He discovered, using the latest scientific technology, mind you, that your heart rate goes up from 65 beats per minute to 136 beats per minute! How does the narrator describe a jump of 71 beats per minute? Like this: “Dr. Fredericks’ scientific experiments prove that before using the Hawaii Chair the average breathing rate is 65 times and after using the Hawaii Chair, for ten minutes only, the breathing rate increases by 136 times!” Notice how “per minute” is elided and how the preposition “by” makes it seem that we would have to multiply 65 by 136 to get the new Hawaii Chair heart rate. (By the way, if we did the math on that, we get 8,840 beats per minute [assuming, of course, they are going by minutes here]—that will kill you, not help your circulation.) Luckily they have an EKG machine from 1985 to help clarify the botched English of our poor narrator. And isn’t it common knowledge that 65 beats per minute is the standard resting heart rate? Why would our doctor need to do scientific experiments to figure that out? Ultimately, this is not proof that the stupid chair even works. An elevated heart rate can be an indication of strenuous exercise, but it also could be a sign of stress, fear, or excitement. If you had to constantly try to balance yourself for ten minutes, don’t you think your heart rate would go up? We’re sorry Dr. Fredericks, but even with all your science, you do not have us convinced that this is something more than a joke.

Our humble narrator then either relates an experience he had or is translating for a woman who most likely speaks better English than he does. We’re guessing that it’s the latter, because the video introduces Karen Nelson from Fountain Valley, CA. She’s probably telling her story competently, but we don’t get to hear that. Thanks, narrator dude.

Lastly, throughout the video we have that stupid song about the Hawaii Chair playing in what is supposed to be the background. Unfortunately, it is as loud as the narrator, and the ensuing cacophony makes you see vertigo, leaving you to seize your skull with clawed hands. This is a far cry from the peacefulness and relaxation that connotes Hawaii and everything Hawaiian.

We cannot convince you enough to avoid this machine. The machine, if not a complete joke, is at least ridiculous in concept and execution. Luckily we have our good friend Ellen DeGeneres to show us just how stupid and impractical the Hawaii Chair is:

We’re Baaaaaaaaaack: The Ab Flyer.

Tony Little nearly destroyed us last week. His sincerity and hair almost made us swoon, and it seemed we had lost faith in the nearing abpocalypse. But not to worry faithful followers! We found an ab machine which is sure to make your midsection shudder in ab-solute disgust.




That’s right, friends, Romans, and countrymen: it’s the Ab Flyer.

This infomercial has all the ingredients we have denounced from the very beginning of our blog. Blue computer-animated men, before and after photos, a patented “Reverse Arc Motion,” fake scientific studies, and the classic introduction in black and white showing people that could not perform one crunch to save their lives are all there, waiting for our jaded mind to criticize. We actually do not know where to start. After a near-flawless video, we now have a generic one, replete with every single error we could hope for. When it rains it pours.

One thing we noticed about the infomercial is that there is a total lack of puns. This is a good thing, you must be thinking, O Reader, but it is not. The audience must have at least one pun, or, lacking that, a reason why the makers of the ab machine named it the Ab Flyer. It does not have wings or a jet engine, and it rather resembles a cradle more than any kind of flyer. In fact, if they called it the “Ab Cradle” that would have been far better: the name connotes childhood, and with it would come the nostalgia of a time when everyone weighed less than they do now. Alas, they did not choose an appropriate name, and they do not want their audience to be privy to the reason why they chose such a name.

Speaking of misnomers, we must address their patented “Reverse Arc Motion.” Verbose and redundant, this phrase means next to nothing to us. Why is it just a reverse arc motion when it is obvious from the video that you swing back and forth? Of course you’re making a reverse arc motion; you’re also making a forward arc motion. Is anyone really fooled by such a phrase?

Because of YouTube, we can pause to read some of the fine print. It is strange that we never thought of doing this before, but something about the Ab Flyer forced us to over-scrutinize the video. This is what we discovered: “On average individuals lost 14 pounds, 3 inches from their waste and 13 inches overall.” This message is displayed when the video shows “Kristen’s” before and after shot, and it returns when they show “Josh’s” (hereinafter referred to as “the douche”) before and after pictures. We must wonder what source they used to calculate this average. Nonetheless, it is not very impressive. If you weigh 300 pounds and purchase the Ab Flyer, you’ll end up weighing 286 pounds and your gut will shrink three inches. It will not look like a tremendous change—in fact, you may just look pretty much the same as if you had done crunches. What’s more is that “Individuals regularly followed the Ab Flyer exercise and meal plan for 12 weeks” to get those results (that’s the fine print displayed during Kristen’s and the douche’s interviews). You have to spend three months to lose an average of 14 pounds and, at best, 13 inches all over. Ummm… We’re thinking that you should probably just stick to crunches. With crunches, you don’t have to follow any particular exercise regimen (besides just doing them), nor would you have to change your diet tremendously (who knows what kind of meal plan the Ab Flyer offers? It’s not even in their infomercial beyond the fine print!), and you’d probably end up with the same results over a three month period.

The last thing we’d like to comment on is the Resistance Dial. Why do all ab machines have to stress the change in resistance for one of the few exercises people do not use weights for? The Ab Flyer, being the banal, generic ab machine that it is, also touts its ability to add resistance to your crunch, but the way they express this is interesting: “The Ab Flyer adjusts to any fitness level: beginner to advanced.” Who does an “advanced” crunch? On top of that, who does a “beginner” crunch (is that anything like “girl push-ups”)? The terms beginner and advanced do not necessarily have anything to do with the amount of resistance you have for a crunch. A crunch, be it on the ground or in a cradle with Reverse Arc Motion, is a crunch, and adding weight or resistance does not change the fact that it’s a crunch.

Everything else about this infomercial we have already criticized in other posts. The Ab Flyer is so formulaic that we had to read the fine print to look for something different to talk about. Nothing stood out in the video despite the Ab Flyer’s mysterious connection with the sky. The Ab Flyer has dropped us down to earth from the Little cloud we were lounging in.