Exercise According to Tony Little: Part 1

Today’s entry concerns a useless exercise machine, and its equally useless manual.

I’ve decided it’s time to do something neat with this blog. I have stumbled across an item that possesses such stupidity that it cannot be described with one post on this blog, not two, but THREE! This will be a three-part post, each entry being posted within a couple days of the other. So, like, look forward to it and stuff.

My mom is really into the whole exercise and fitness thing, so she buys a whole lot of related items. She has two exercise balls (she never uses them, but they’re fun), a Tony Little Gazelle Knock-Off (which tends to get used as a place to hang drying towels more than anything), a few weights (again, you never see her using them), insane loads of exercise videos that she watches occasionally, and she used to have an Orbitrek Exercise Bike, but my dad told her to get rid of it because the thing was a death trap. She’s still always on the hunt for more exercise stuff, though. This quest led her to buy arguably her most useless item yet:

The TONY LITTLE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STEPPER, because just spelling out “and” is for panzies.

Oh, yes. It looks like either some weird stand or a weirder paperweight, but that’s not what it’s used for. Here is how it works:

See those two pads on either side? You step up on them (start by pressing one foot down as far as possible on one, then carefully put the other foot on the opposite pad), then, to exercise, you shift your weight from one foot to the other, which presses the weighted foot down and the opposite foot up.

So, it’s a machine that shows you what it’s like to WALK. My mother insists that she cannot take the dog for walks or anything like that. I guess you can’t truly exercise unless you’ve paid sixty dollars.

You heard correctly. This thing is sixty dollars. She bought it at a thrift store that originally had it priced at twenty six dollars, but through the magic of sales and coupons she got it for three dollars.

But for you people who did get sucked into spending sixty dollars on this contraption, worry not! That’s not all that came packaged with it when my mom bought it. It ALSO included two DVDs and a manual. Allow me to walk you through this manual.

The first page shows you the number you can call for the Personal Trainer Hotline. I think it would be fun to call this hotline. What I would say I do not know, but at least I could find out if there are really people out there who sit in cubicles answering calls about how to use the magical Tony Little’s Learn To Shift Your Weight Slightly Machine.

Next page tells you in great detail how to get on the machine, as if it wasn’t a simple enough concept. Review what I said a couple paragraphs above if it still doesn’t make sense to you. Then page four goes into the Boring Safety Precautions, of which my personal favorites are:

Do not use in or around water or with wet hands or feet

Bluh? Who uses this thing IN water?
“Hey, honey! I’ve decided that this new exercise machine wasn’t good enough in the house, so now I’m going to toss it into the deep end of the pool and try it down there! Wish me luck!”
“Fantastic idea, sweetheart.”
*SPLOOSH*
*Drown*
*Lawsuit*
*Insertion of new Safety Precaution*

Do not place heavy items on the unit.

Heavy items? Like, say, a human?

Only one person may use the product at a time.

Now, how and why would you fit two people on this thing? You could, I guess, place one person on each foot pad and make an awkward little seesaw, but I think your little child Danny and his friend Micky are going to be able to find more appealing ways to occupy their time than play seesaw on your stupid exercise machine.

Do not use under the influence of alcohol, drugs, or excessive exhaustion.

“I’m so f***ing plastered. Hey! I wanna whiff of that bong! Ah, thanks. *cough* Hold on a second, dudes, I *cough* gotta *hack* exercise now.”

Next page lists supplies that were supposed to come with the Rock ‘N’ Roll Stepper. One of these was the exercise mat, which this particular thrift-store package did not come with. The exercise mat is, apparently, very important, because otherwise the stepper is not quite as safe as it should be. Turns out, this is true, as using the Rock ‘N’ Roll Stepper without the mat causes it to start scooting backwards fairly rapidly, so after a couple of minutes of continuous use, don’t be surprised to suddenly hit the couch. I wonder how fast you can travel on this thing if you try really hard. I look forward to running over cats.

Let’s see, what else is funny on this page… One of the materials used in the machine is PP Resin. As in, y’know, Pee-Pee Resin? Ha?

Oh, there’s a footnote at the bottom. There are actually a couple of footnotes in this manual, but it’s apparent that none of the writers knew how to use them. See, with footnotes you start by putting an asterisk next to a word, then put an identical asterisk at the bottom of the page next to a message that provides additional information about that phrase that had the starting asterisk next to it. The problem is that in this manual there are never any starting asterisks.

Next page shows us how to use the stepper, in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already. Let’s review how that goes, just in case:

You depress one pedal all the way to the floor with one foor, then carefully raise your other foot to the other pedal and stand with both pedals at an even height.

Got it? Good. Now you’re ready for Step 2: Transferring Your Weight: You do this by… transferring your weight from one foot to the other. Oh, but before you can do that you must, and I quote, “Pull your belly button into your spine to engage your abs and balance”.

Pull your belly button into your spine.

It hurts just thinking about it.

Then you “get your rhythm” by transferring weight at different rates. Understand? Great. Now it’s time to turn the page to start your EXERCISE PROGRAM!

The manual constantly discourages using the ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STEPPER (just learned that you’re supposed to write the name in all capital letters for some reason) seven days a week. Instead we must progress slowly to let our bodies adjust to walking an extra fifteen minutes every other day.

NO.

STOP.

Sorry, but it turns out if you’re a “beginner” you should start by using it FIVE minutes every other day. Only “as your fitness increases” can you do crazy stuff like using it more often. How you measure fitness I don’t know. Anyway, you can eventually move up to doing ten minutes a day. The Intermediate/Advanced exercise plan starts out at fifteen minutes every other day, and you keep improving from there. Isn’t that great?

Ooh! I hope you’re ready to get REALLY PUMPED because it’s time for EXERCISE VARIATIONS!

What’s the first one, you might ask? Why, you swing your arms around like an idiot, of course! This, paired with pretending to walk, means the machine is good for teaching anybody how to Do the Mario.

In the next one you learn to SQUAT while doing the usual routine with the machine. Of course, just naming an exercise “Squats” would be awkward, so they named this little number “Rock Squats”, which actually sounds even more awkward.

Hey, did you know that YOU CAN BENEFIT FROM EXERCISE? Well, according to a random paragraph at the bottom of the page, you can! Just in case anyone had spent sixty dollars on an exercise machine and read halfway through the manual thinking “Exercise is totally retarded”.

But wait! There are more exercise variations on the next page! Now we have Arm Raises, which are exactly what they sound like. The first sentence used to describe the exercise says that you will “Bring sexy back to your back and arms”, though I’ve never found very much about the back and arms “sexy”.

And lastly we have Core Twists, which are, you guessed it, when you twist your torso while using the machine. Another random paragraph at the bottom of this page promises that YOU WILL lose weight, get fit, etc. AND have a stronger core and stuff. Those are the exact words that are put in bold text. I can kinda see why they bolded and all-capsed “you will”, but there’s not much that’s attention grabbing about the word “and”.

Next page is boring stuff about the digital panel.

Then we have the question and answer page. This is where we learn more boring things like how knee discomfort is normal, the machine is safe for the floor, you need to use the mat (WHICH WE DON’T HAVE OH GOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE), how it’s easy to balance on the thing, the weight limit, and that apparently only women can use it. By this I mean that they specifically use female pronouns only. I’d imagine this machine should also come with some sort of home-made “NO BOYS ALLOWED” sign.

Next is a boring product warranty, and then TWO PAGES OF NOTES. Exactly what kind of notes you would put in there beats me.

Anyway, finally there’s a chart about which heart rates are healthy for which ages. The ages go from ten to one hundred, but I’m pretty sure that if I hit one hundred, exercising with Tony Little won’t be a primary concern, if I’m even capable of thinking at all. Apparently we learn how to use this chart on the Personal Trainer DVDs. These DVDs (package came with two, if you recall) will be the subject of the next post here. Check back in a couple of days!

~ by krakenzilla on July 21, 2008.