Get In Shape With These Weird Fitness Inventions

As part of our #KeepFitOffice month, we’re taking a look at some exercise equipment that every office needs.  Perhaps.

Oh, Christmas.  You’re so good to us with your carols, pristine snow and large meals.  Trying to shake off your fattening embrace in the New Year can be tough, especially if you’re sitting down all day.  But with these, admittedly slightly weird, exercise inventions, you and your office can get #fit together.

The Hawaii Chair

What if you could #exercise right at your desk?  And what if that exercise could be done for you by your office furniture?

With the Hawaii chair you can get trim as you type and all it will cost you is a few peculiar stares from colleagues and visitors.  (Or you can get a hula hoop – I found some research that suggests a good hula session can burn as many calories as step aerobics and cardio kickboxing.)

Zander Machines

Gustav Zander was a Swedish doctor whose ‘mechanotherapy’ was a form of therapeutic massage and resistance training, that used peculiar-looking machines powered by electricity and steam.

As bizarre as that sounds, Zander was terribly successful and by 1906 had institutes across Europe and South America.  He even managed to get his treatments sponsored by a German government scheme to rehabilitate injured workers and get them back to their jobs. (Is that something HR would go for today?)

If I could have any of his machines in the office, it’d be the vibrating ostrich thing (3 min 30 sec in).

The Gravimotor

Patented in 1884 by two Canadians, the Gravimotor was a ‘weight driven rollerskate’.  Instead of pushing yourself along, the weight you put on each foot as you ‘walked’ activated a spring that turned the Gravimotor’s wheels, propelling you forward.  As the patent says, the inventors wanted to ‘provide an improved motor or vehicle, which can be attached to the foot’.

Best of all, you could use it with heels.  (I’d quite like to see these used in haute couture fashion shows – hopefully the models will manage to stop before rolling off the end of the catwalk.)

Free Flexor Dumbells

Even if your office is lucky enough to have a gym, you’ve probably got a bit bored with it by now.  There’s only so much you can do with a standard set of weights before you need new ways to challenge your body and mind.

Thankfully, the Free Flexor system offers an innovative way to exercise and will make you look extra masculine as you flex your way to the water cooler.

The Face Trainer

Keeping fit and staying toned isn’t just about your core, it’s also about your jaw.  If you want to lose those ‘Christmas Chins’, you’ll need something that’s effective and inconspicuous, so you can use it at the office as well as at home.   As a bonus, it would be cool if the product could be double as fancy dress, perhaps for a ‘Hannibal Lecter Goes Scuba Diving’ party.

Remember, ‘don’t allow teeth to touch inside of lips’.  Easy.

Have you come across any peculiar exercise equipment on your post-Xmas health kick?  Let us know in the comments.