How the Switch from the Sit-Up to the Crunch Created the Ab-Scam Industry

In the 1990s, the prevailing wisdom around sit-ups changed and the crunch became all the rage, primarily for spinal health reasons. It also made the exercise easier, both to perform and for scammers to capitalize on.

From World War II onward, crunches reigned as the preeminent midsection training move, bolstered by its position as the an essential component of the US Army Physical Readiness Test.. It would take roughly 25 years after the fall of Nazi Germany for questions about the safety and sufficiency of sit-ups to arise, and for those in the know to offer acceptable alternatives.

In that sense, the progression from sit-ups to sit-ups it was as healthily necessary as it was technically essential. All of the required contraction of the abdominal muscles took place during the initial stages of the abdominal movement, while the flexion at the waist and raising of the entire back placed the trainee’s spine in a compromising position, unnecessarily risked its stability and turned out to be totally superfluous. When the “half squat” or “quarter squat,” whose name eventually came by consensus to “the crunch,” replaced the full squat, it greatly simplified the abdominal training process.

However, it also made it much easier for fitness fraudsters to sell their products.

Laying the groundwork for an outright fitness scam

Concomitant with these subtle changes in abdominal training, there were staggering changes in American gym attendance and immersion in fitness culture that occurred in the late 20th century. Between 1981 and 1995, health club membership increased by 13 million members to 24.1 millionen route to a staggering 33 million members in the late 1990s. In 1999, the Associated Press reported that Bally Total Fitness only owned 31 percent of all gym memberships, implying that the fitness giant fitness had purchased 8 million memberships for just 360 club locations.

And while I can confidently say that the vast majority of people were not regularly frequenting the clubs they signed up for training at, these numbers prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a gym/fitness fad was indeed taking place.

Meanwhile, the heyday of the American collective was also underway at this time obsession with visible abs as the most critical body part to enhance and show off. A 1996 American survey by NordicTrack revealed that 60 percent of respondents listed their abs as the body part they were most interested in improving, with legs finishing a distant second at 14 percent.

All of which is to say that a growing familiarity with fitness among the general population, a shift in relevance between abdominal training tactics, and an unprecedented fascination with slim, toned waists created a confluence of factors that made the market of home fitness was full of demands. possibility of an easy scam.

Scammers arise

It was into this environment that several training devices were launched that were embarrassingly similar in design, taking advantage of the alcohol- and sleep-deprived-fueled belief in the transformative magic of exercise that many viewers of late-night infomercials fell prey to during that time. mid-1990s period.

The first such product to make its presence felt was the abdominal trainer, the brainchild of Don Brown and Bob Hanington. The Ab Trainer featured a rocker-style design, with padded support for the head, neck, and arms. In an interview about the success of his product printed in The messenger news In April 1995, Brown claimed that his invention “solved the most common problem associated with abdominal exercises.” Perhaps, but Ab Trainer also gave his students ample opportunity to cheat the movement by pressing with their hands and arms, thus creating the illusion of improving the productivity of the abs while simply replacing the movement instead.

In 1996, several Ab Trainer competitors entered the market, beginning with the nearly identical Ab Sculptor from Tristar Products. The main difference was an adjustable handlebar and the ability to fold down. your infomercial did its best to impress viewers with the practicality of the Ab Sculptor as a portable device when folded that can be taken anywhere, even though the frame of the folded unit is still larger and more unwieldy than everything except a steam chest.

At about the same time Ab Coach hit the market. It also functionally resembled the Ab Trainer, except for the fact that it had no arm pads and included a protruding bar for adding weight plates, supposedly to provide additional resistance. Since crunches are essentially (an inevitable pun intended) a minimal-motion resistance exercise through which the user strives for a maximal contraction on each rep, this feature had no fundamental value. Speaking of lack of value, Ab Coach customers can also purchase a calorie and rep counter. Since the average person burns one calorie with every six sit-ups, I’d be surprised if someone’s calorie counter hit triple digits.

These three devices were quickly joined by the abdominal roller promoted by aerobics champion Brenda DyGraf, and perfect abs lead by Buns of Steel spokesperson Tamilee Webb. Both were functional replicas of the Ab Trainer, but with adjustable bar lengths and “power holders” to hold them in place. Apparently no one considered that if you were performing device-assisted sit-ups with enough force to cause the curved, padded edges of the contraptions to slide and slide right under you, a form correction was desperately needed.

The most original of these implements was the NordicTrack Ab Works device. your infomercial It featured all the fitness tropes of the mid-1990s, including neon colors, sweaty, tanned abs, and a hazy atmosphere. All this pomp and circumstance was to announce a crunch device with a bit more functionality than the others, but at twice the price. The infomercial even featured Tony Horton, a full decade before he redeemed himself by lending his face to boost sales of a legitimate value fitness system.

So what exactly was the scam?

It lurks in the clever use of the term “fitness system,” and newspaper advertisements for the products betray how essential the wording was to circumvent the shortcomings of the products’ inability to achieve advertised results. The ads added their claims with fine print language suggesting that what was really for sale was the “system” that included the abdominal training devices rather than the actual devices themselves.

This was similar to the misleading language used by Nintendo to include a toy robot with its video game system and market it as an “entertainment system” after US retailers got burned by the Atari bubble burst and shunned video games altogether.

Mathematically speaking, if you really take 30 sit-ups for the average person to burn five calories —and thus six sit-ups to burn a single calorie—it would take 900 stomach-wrecking sit-ups a day just to burn off the caloric content of a can of most soft drinks. At two seconds per crunch, that’s 30 minutes of nonstop crunching per day. And with a single pound of fat clocking in at roughly 3,200 calories, it’s safe to say that no one was burning appreciable fat on any of these ab-training implements. Unless the fat is gone, even the strongest abs in the world will remain permanently hidden from view.

However, thanks to their clever wording, abdominal device companies could attribute their customers’ failures to acquire appreciable six pack abs — or lose an inch from the waist — to failure to adhere to the “system,” including diet and aerobic plan. Clearly, the overall intent was to mislead potential customers into believing that a machine-assisted meltdown could cause pounds of fat to evaporate just as quickly as the $40 to $120 flowing out of those same customers’ wallets.

Even as these devices reached the height of their popularity, the researchers exposed what discerning viewers had been aware of all along. When asked about the quality of the devices by the Minneapolis Star Tribune In 1997, California State University biomechanics researcher William Whiting had this to say: “I think these devices are worth it.” Yes they can motivate you to start exercising and keep doing it. They’re just no better than sit-ups or sit-ups for the core.”

The consequences

When the original avalanche of crisis relief devices peaked and disappeared, the market quickly joined the multiple devices what were they more elaborateso ineffective and so gloomy. The whole ordeal speaks to the need for better physics literacy, as millions of dollars were wasted in pursuit of physiques that a curvy combination of alloy steel, foam rubber, and plastic were utterly incapable of achieving.

The transition from sit-ups to sit-ups offered the rare instance where a correction was required for the sake of a trainee’s safety; it just so happened that it made the process of building abs easier. Still, it was always true that physical fitness is only achieved through discipline and hard work. In other words, if a fitness company offers you a device designed to take the simplest workout moves and make it easier, you’re likely to lose your money on that exchange, along with any hopes you had of maximizing your workout. results