The trouble with exercise is that it requires effort and motivation. I admit that I have a serious shortage of these qualities. Maybe I’ve spent too much time around cats because I see a period of exercise as a snooze wasted. However, I recently identified a need to tone myself up a bit but with 40 years of smoking behind me, most of the usual aerobic options were out of the question.
After Googling such phrases as “Exercise without any effort whatsoever”, I did some digging, read a few reviews and invested in a Bluefin Fitness Vibration Plate. All the blurb and reviews claimed that it matched my level of commitment and goals perfectly so I thought I’d give it a go.
Once unpacked, it sat in a spare corner of my house glaring at me for about a month. The User Guide that came with it was pretty useless in terms of getting some sort of action plan together and choosing exercises that wouldn’t shake my spine into pieces. Eventually, I found a suitable Beginner’s video on Youtube that looked OK to follow and last week I finally decided to give it a try…….
Some general observations first.
- The young lady in the video had the BMI of a racing pencil. When on the device, she showed hardly any sign of wobbling. The lack of lard on her rather pretty young bones did not give an accurate representation of the amount of body movement that was about to come my way.
- I don’t know how she did it but the young lady maintained a fixed smile all the way through the various exercises. I found this physically impossible so I can only conclude that her smile had been fixed with the aid of a stapler and/or rivet gun.
- One or two of the exercises involved being seated completely on the vibration plate. Bearing in mind that lardy people are going to be buying these devices, the target area for my substantial bottom was inadequate. I felt like I was trying to land an airship on a dinner plate. The young smiling lady could do it easily of course because the manufacturer had chosen their demonstrator from some kind of hobbit gym.
So, I set the plate’s vibration/pain level to Low and off I went. Initially, the feeling was very odd and I found balancing quite difficult. I’ve since discovered that I actually feel more balanced if I set the plate to Medium. I followed the smiling lady as best as I could but a couple of the poses caused me to wobble so much that it was just too uncomfortable to hold them. How uncomfortable? Well, put it this way, imagine hurtling along an old cobbled street on a bicycle with solid tyres whilst headbanging to Scandanavian death metal. I paused the video and went back to make sure that I was striking the same pose as the instructor because she was barely moving and still bloody smiling. Yep, the pose was OK but the vibration still intolerable.
The two stretchy arm exercising ‘things’ attached to the base unit were pretty useless, to be honest, One exercise involved raising them to shoulder height with arms stretched out and palms facing downwards and the other was what people usually call a ‘bicep curl’. I know the plan is for the exercise to be gentle but the stretchy bands offered about as much resistance as me trying to fend off the passionate advances of Jennifer Lawrence.
As I mentioned earlier, the plate isn’t really designed for fat arses to sit on, so the exercise where the smiling (and now rather annoying) lady was sat cross-legged on it proved to be very interesting. Try as I might, I just couldn’t fit myself on the plate, let alone cross my legs in front of me. I finally gave up when my backside pressed one of the touch-sensitive control buttons on the plate and it entered into what can only be described as ‘epilepsy’ mode and dumped me on the kitchen floor.
Conclusion
I’m not sure if I can come to a cast-iron conclusion yet. It’s still early days in my quest to gain a waistline instead of a circumference. All I can say is that the day after my first attempt, it felt like someone was stabbing the areas around my knees with pencils and I had trouble descending stairs. Whether I could have achieved the same level of ridiculous incapacity just by doing the exercise routine on a motionless floor, is an unknown. The jury is currently out on whether all that jiggling about is actually doing any good.
To be continued………………