EUGENIZATION.

Quick, what do you get when you cross a marketer with a psuedoscientist and a willing design team?

Answer: Dubious equipment!

I do have one good thing to say about The Ultimate Burn Machine - it sure is pretty. Someone had a good time designing it.

Clients often ask me about these various exercise contraptions, as some are in vogue, some have had their hey-days, and some just should never have made it off the drawing board. The problem with these machines is an issue of “half-truth.”

You see, most of the time, it’s not that the manufacturers are lying about what the machine does (ok, maybe they are), but that they take a physiological fact and divorce it from the bigger picture, making it only “kinda true.”

For example, a client asked me once about “Cortislim”, a fat-loss supplement that proposed to eliminate fat by reducing the amount of cortisol released in your bloodstream. Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone, and chronic release of cortisol in the bloodstream is implicated in fat storage, especially around the belly. Cortislim, the ads promise, will help reduce belly fat by controlling the release of cortisol. Sounds reasonable…

…until you realize that in order for cortisol to mobilize fat to be stored in the belly, there has to be a source of all this excess fat - i.e., excess food calories from eating more than your body requires. Hence, you can’t just take Cortislim and lose belly fat; you have to control diet and (hopefully) exercise (*ahem strength train) to ensure there are no excess calories running around to be stored as fat. So while it is true that cortisol release does these bad things, you don’t get the whole picture.

Here are some gems I picked out to share with you all:

1.) “Regular weightlifting actually discourages use of the stabilizing muscles, tendons, and ligaments.”

…because lifting big, heavy, unwieldy barbells and dumbbells doesn’t require any stabilization whatsoever - of course! How could I have been so naive to think my rotator cuff muscles stabilize my shoulder under a heavy bench press?

2.) “By forcing the body to control the weight, without the added support of isolating the working muscle, you end up utilizing the deeper, harder to work, stabilizing and supporting muscles. What you end up with is functional, practical strength.”

The term “functional strength” is thrown around nowadays so much the mere sight of it makes me want to throw up. “Functional strength” used to mean “usable strength; strength that enhances ability to perform coordinated movement.” Its current definition, however, is something more like this:

Above: Circus, I mean, “functional training.”

3.) “By shifting the weight you can perform the same movements that you may do with regular weights, but by changing your center of gravity, you now force your body’s deep stabilizers to work to counter act the asymmetry in weight. If you know and understand your body’s weak side, you can actually strengthen it while not over strengthening the strong side.“(emphasis added)

Well, if you know and understand the body’s weak side, you can simply address this issue with weights. One can perform exercises with dumbbells only to the ability of the weaker side, therefore allowing the weaker side to catch up to the stronger side. On fixed bar (barbell) movements, one can emphasize pushing with the weaker side to create a greater stimulus for improvement for the weaker side. Point being, if you’re unaware of your body and it’s imbalances, having a nifty spinny machine isn’t going to help much.

When viewing the Burn Machine in motion, the counterweight swings around randomly. I don’t see how that’s providing for improving a weaker side while not overstrengthening the strong side. If anything, it would further exacerbate any preexisting imbalances (since your strong side would try to compensate for the weaker side and handle the majority of the randomly sliding asymmetric load). So what is this person talking about?

I still can’t figure it out either.

4.) “Whether you are a baseball player, golfer, tennis play, soccer player or ping pong player, all sport is asymmetrical.”

One of the tried and true arguments of “functional trainers” is “imbalances will inevitably cause injuries.” So if Maria Sharapova strengthens her right arm (her hitting arm) 200% more than her left, does that mean that her left arm is going to fall off or something when she volleys? Of course not. Muscular imbalances do not doom you to an early immobility (I’ve yet to hear of a “functional trainer” finding a client who wasn’t imbalanced, yet somehow, the client continues to get up and go to work in order to fund training sessions with said functional trainer). Muscular weakness, however, will result in impaired function.

Incidentally, Dr. Burn seems to have forgotten that the weightlifting she ranted about earlier is one of the few sports that is symmetrical. Whoops.

Here’s the bottom line: when presenting a new gadget, marketers often use a hint of the truth in order to legitimize the product to the customer. I say: Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. Become educated in the world of fitness, or ask a professional you trust (or his colleagues, all of them) about products and services that seem too good to be true. Make sure you get the whole picture, because a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.