Fitness Novelty vs Fitness Science

I had to chuckle when this new fitness device showed up in my news feed today.

Novelty drives the fitness marketplace, and that’s a shame because we’d all be so much better served if science drove the market. Wouldn’t it be better to hear; “Here’s a new device to get 15% more intensity from your triceps!”

Instead we get fitness models swinging a 4lb axe.

And it’s not that chopping wood can’t be great exercise. When I was a kid my brothers and I had to cut and split several cords of Canadian maple hardwood every autumn.

We used an 8lb splitting maul (twice the weight of this new toy) and occasionally a 12lb sledgehammer and a splitting wedge. It was very demanding, although it was mostly because of the volume of exercise over hours of hard manual labor.

It’s great that we live at a time when new technology can track our exercise and make calculations for us, it’s just too bad that technology is squandered on silly novelty (remember Shake Weights??) instead of objective measurements of each individual’s power, intensity, duration, and recovery.

I guess progress moves too slowly for all of us in every area of human and social improvement.

Until then the rational among us will avoid silly gadgets and create a market for real innovation and good exercise science.