Okay I switched the telly back on when I was eating this morning and that vibration ad was on...AGAIN! This time I watched it in it's entirety and I tell you what, now I have now been inspired to write a comprehensive article on this product for Amino Z...stay tuned.
But nevertheless, I need to get this off my chest.
For starters, I cannot believe what marketers get away with in Australia. In the most round-a-bout way possible, they managed to link standing on a vibration machine to weight loss with no effort at all. Basically the insinuation here is that as you stand on the vibration platform, your legs warm up (as is shown by a "special" thermo-image...wow!) Now the increased heat loosens tensions of the body tissue which apparently paves the way for fat loss.
Whilst they may claim that "the proof is in the heat"...it's this type of crap that really makes my blood boil (okay not litterally...but using this line of thinking, if my blood really was boiling, then I'd probably be burning HEAPS of fat! :) ) With this same simplistic rationale, why not just step foot in a sauna for 10 minutes a day?
Now what really got to me was that probably 90% of this advertisement implied that no exercise was required for muscle tone, fat loss, flexibility and improved circulation. In fact, they had 2 models standing on the machine and suggested that you only need to stand on this machine for so many minutes a day (I believe it was 10, but will have to double check). It was only a little bit at the end of the ad that they actually showed a quick snippet of someone doing lunges and a straight armed plank on the machine.
Being the subjective ad that it was, there was absolutely no reference to objective research on this "breakthrough technology" in regards to fat loss. There were just a bunch of before and after photo's of people who "apparently" stood on the machine for a few minutes a day with no other change to their lifestyle.
Common sense will tell you not to buy this type of marketing crap. The same can be said about all the latest diet and exercise gimmicks that have been released (and then quickly dissapear) over the past forty years. But it's naturally instinctual of human beings to find the quickest and easiest way to achieve a certain desire. So I really think that, so long as advertising like this continues to be permitted, we will see many more generations of these machines with outragous promises, yet which deliver very little.
