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.
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