“No way! Who makes it, Nasa?” I hear you cry in disbelief.
But wait. The Rom’s main selling point is that it promises to get you fit in four minutes a day. Yes, four minutes. The Rom (for range of motion) is an imposingly beautiful machine, in a Harley-Davidson meets futuristic porn dungeon sort of way.
It’s also a quality piece of hardware — sturdy and built to last, even though the most useful characteristics of any home exercise machine are surely the ability to repel dust and protrusions to hang laundry on.
I might get one simply on the grounds that it’s much easier to fail to work out for four minutes a day than for an hour. I know it’s $15,000, but what a timesaver! Think about it — spending that much money on not going to the gym would take me about 10 years.
I think I speak for all lazy men everywhere when I say how very, very much we want to believe there is a magical exception to the “no pain, no gain” theory of fitness. The extent of our willingness to buy into quick-fix technological solutions would be laughable were it not so easily exploited for financial gain.
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Mine is the classic lazy man dilemma: I would quite like to be fitter; on the other hand I’m an inveterate skiver. And I love technology. In fact, if I loved it any more I would probably have to worship it as a god.
Unfortunately the fitness industry has devised a bewildering array of products with this exact combination of personality traits in mind. There’s even one that makes less demand on my precious time than the Rom’s four minutes a day — a hand-held plastic device called 6 Second Abs. And it costs only
35 quid. In my heart of hearts I know it can’t work. Who can’t afford £35 and six seconds a day? If it were that easy, everybody would not only own the machine, but sport a perfect six-pack too.
We’re back in “reassuringly expensive” territory with the £2,600 Power Plate, which looks like a set of bathroom scales in intimate congress with a metal detector. All it does, as far as I can tell, is vibrate. On the plus side, you use it for only 4Å minutes. Users tell me that your teeth feel strangely loose afterwards.
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If you’re looking for something cheaper, but have a whole half hour a day to spare, you could go for a £100 “toning belt”: a set of actual electrodes that you attach to your actual stomach in the hope of making it flat. Of course it doesn’t actually work; on the other hand, electric shock therapy is a highly effective cure for mental illness. And you would have to be mental to believe that mild electric currents would give you a six-pack.
Nevertheless, there’s something invigorating about having a selection of state-of-the-art fitness equipment close at hand whenever the mood for exercise takes me. Why, only yesterday I spent a strenuous 40 minutes in the spare room, rummaging in vain for — okay, I admit it — my 6 Second Abs machine. I was exhausted. But fortunately that counts as a whole year’s workout.