Getting to the Finish Line Fast: The Abdoer

What? Is this a serious attempt at selling a machine? Or a pornographer’s failed career transformed? In a video that is one minute and six seconds, we don’t even see the slightest inkling of an ab machine until twenty-three seconds in! That’s nearly half the video!

Never mind that the name of the machine is preposterous. Why would anyone—and we mean any one--name a machine a “doer”? Why? It was as if the machine was invented for people like us to tear apart and mock endlessly! It seems that the director of the video wants to play on the name, thus the women clad in modified “extreme” clothing with their mesmerizing movements mimicking models and the subtle pun “getting to the finish line fast,” but is it really worth all of this? We do not think so.

Still, if the machine stood by itself, then it can be argued that a sexy one minute video is just a marketing gimmick—a “beot” in the vein of Beowulf—that intends to show off the achievements of, and raise confidence (and maybe more) in, the product. We shall play along and look further into this so called Abdoer.

A cursory look at the website shows nothing new or impressive there. Instead, we get more of the same: made up names, impossibilities, and people all over the world who apparently used this tortuous machine and enjoyed it.

The made up terms are nearly as ridiculous as the name Abdoer: “Abdobics,” and “Torsion-Flex Technology.” Abdobics, which looks like a person with Dyslexia tried to spell Adobe, is a poor amalgamation of the words “abdominals” and “aerobics.” It is defined as “a routine that targets all sides of your midsection, including your abdominals, obliques and mid-to-lower back region,” which basically means that Abdobics is what you do every time you do any exercise routine that works out your abdominal area. So much for calling a spade a spade. The etymology behind “Torsion-Flex” is more difficult to ascertain: on the one hand we have the obvious reference to “torso,” but on the other hand we get lost with the suffix –ion. Does it come from “motion”? That cannot be so since we have the adjoining “-Flex” there. It could not be “Torso-Motion-Flex Technology” because that would be ridiculous beyond comprehension, even for an ab machine gimmick. There is no way to determine why –ion was added as a suffix, but it does not matter: this is all gibberish anyway.

The impossibilities are comical. We are told that with the Abdoer we are able to make 360 degree movements, an impossibility given the construction of the human spine. We are also told that, under the “Benefits and Features” section, that the inventor of the Abdoer is named “John Abdo.” Are you kidding? We do not believe this for a second until we see an official birth certificate. Granted, if that is his real name then that justifies the stupid name of the machine, but it seems more likely that, instead of trying to come up with a good name for this chair, the inventor (or representative chosen to be deemed the “inventor”) changed his name to Abdo. It does not make sense to hide idiocy with more idiocy unless you are an idiot.

While we do have a lot of time on our hands, we did not bother clicking on all of the videos that comprise the interview portion for the Abdoer website. We decided it would be best to choose one video and extrapolate from what we have seen to the rest of the videos. (We must hand it to the Abdoer: it is trying to make a lot of people famous by giving each about two minutes to show off their acting talent.) We chose to watch Harwood Gordon’s video. Harwood, hailing from England, has an Irish/Welsh/Scottish accent. He announces that he is 64, and he tries oh so very hard to conform to all the British stereotypes at once. From the use of “buggers” and other idioms like “I can go on as the day is long,” to the use of the Abdoer in front of the London Bridge and bagpipe players, Harwood is trying desperately to convince you, O Viewer, that he is indeed from England and he does indeed use the Abdoer. It does not work entirely, at least for us. We thought we heard his accent slipping a few times, but that may just have been our hyper-cynical ears. After that display of poor acting and desperation, we praised our decision to avoid the rest of the videos for fear of other racist or stereotypical attitudes or accents we might encounter. (We also noted that no one from Africa has used the Abdoer… hmmm…)

So our look at the website has left us with the conclusion that the 1:06 video above is not justified at all. Those clothed strippers may be an attempt to make the Abdoer look cool despite its name, but the only cool thing about this machine is the logo: the way “Twist” is written is pretty neat, honestly. However, one does not purchase a machine for its logo; one purchases a machine to perform a function. It is not entirely clear that this machine will get you to the finish line—whatever that is—any faster than crunches or any other ab machine for that matter. It may not even get you to the finish line at all.

The Not So Airtight Air Climber

So the quality isn’t that great, but at least we get the best of both worlds: you don’t have to click a link and we can still be as lazy as ever. It works out. You must have by now noticed that the above video is not the complete video, but we imagined that the complete one would not greatly add anything to this post. We seem to have enough material with the abridged version.

To start things off, we must ask: what exactly is a “Limited Lifetime Warrantee”? Does this mean that the lifetime (either of the machine or you [or both?]) is limited, and they can only warrant that limited life? We are not quite sure why they have a limited lifetime warrantee and why they would proudly announce that in their commercial.

It’s not just the legal mumbo-jumbo that gets us; the pun “airtight” (used only once in the above video) is poorly constructed as well. What exactly does it mean to have “airtight abs”? We suppose it means air cannot penetrate your abs, thereby sealing in the freshness of your intestines. The funny thing is, in order for your muscles to function, you would need air to circulate in them. That is essentially what blood does in your body… and they think they can just rattle off “airtight abs” and we would just nod our heads in agreement.

We also have a ridiculous acronym which the marketing department for the Air Climber has decided we should just accept without a word in protest: APT. What is Air Power Technology? This acronym is by far the worst we have encountered to date. First of all, “apt” is actually a word, so that could be confusing in certain circumstances. Second of all, they are trying to pass off centuries-old technology as something modern and up-to-date simply by hiding the words behind their initial letters. People have been using bellows to stoke fires since the advent of the chimney, and now they’re trying to tell us that the Air Climber is state-of-the-art equipment? We don’t buy it.

Really, though, it’s not just the inept APT and vague phraseology that are the heart of what is wrong with the Air Climber, although they are symptomatic of the poor marketing endemic to all ab machines: It is the demographic itself. If you look closely at the above video, there is an average ratio of four women to every man. Clearly they are feeding off the presumed fact that women are insecure about their bodies, and if they show enough women with lean stomachs (who probably didn’t use the Air Climber to get the bodies they have now), then they will sell more bicycle pumps to the unwitting public. This is not just a problem with the Air Climber, it is characteristic of all ab machine infomercials. They generally market to women by showing a predominant number of women in their advertisements, and, wherever possible, have women spokeswomen spouting out inanities in hopes of raking in profits on pieces of plastic filled with—in this case—hot air. (Of course, Sean T. and T. Little are exceptions here.) What makes this all the more horrendous is that the stupid puns, inaccurate acronyms, fake charts and graphs, and monotonous testimonials belie the fact that the creators of the Air Climber and other ab machines think women are generally stupid enough to fall for flimsy marketing gimmicks and preposterous lies. They assume that people will gloss over glaring inconsistencies and fine print because their desire for an unattainable, perfect body will conquer the modicum of rationality that they possess and goad them into purchasing these things they don’t need. To ensure their audience is thoughtless, they pad their commercials with how fun the machine is, how technological it is, how easy it is to use, and how certain the results are when none of those things can be proven to be any better than the multitude of free workouts one can do. Even the name of the machine itself is inaccurate: the Air Climber? You’re staying in place for crying out loud! Are we supposed to actually believe this tripe?

Phew! Sorry about that, O Reader. That was a rare impassioned moment you were privy to. Our point, however, still stands. This machine is stupid and you should not get it.

Not wanting to end on a depressing note, we do have to give the Air Climber kudos in one aspect of their commercial: their Digital Training Computer. They actually show their “computer” on screen (and, with the beauty of YouTube, you can pause and take a good look at it at 2:11) and you can see clearly that it is just a counter with a timer. The nice big red button that looks like it could have launched an entire nuclear arsenal in a '50s movie is a good touch. We are certain “MODE,” “RPMS,” and “SCAN” are just random letters they put together because they ordered too much white paint. Thanks, Air Climber.