Thursday, April 07, 2011

My Weirdest Purchase Lately

It's a muscle stimulator! I was in the mall over the weekend and this kiosk guy tried to talk me into buying one for $100 bucks. I thought it was cool but figured I could do better online. And yes, I did. $40, thanks for asking.

If you ever saw the Bruce Lee biopic Dragon, Lee was a devotee of such machines, though at the time they were tabletop-sized and now you can clip them on your belt. You glue electrodes to your skin over muscle groups and then electric shocks are sent to the muscles, forcing them to contract. It's just like that experiment in high school where you jolted a frog's leg and made it jerk around. No they didn't make me do it in my high school but I heard stories.

I'm using it now on my pecs and man, it's strange. My moobs are dancin'! I've also got a couple on my abs, but that's barely registering. Either I don't have them near enough to the muscles or more likely, they layers of fat are keeping the electricity from getting through.

I think probably what this will be really useful for, as far as I'm concerned, is that nagging middle-back pain that I have. A few months ago I was plagued by lower back pain, and I remembered that a cure for that is ab exercises. Sure enough, I stregnthend those muscles with daily sit-ups and the pain hasn't bothered me. Then I had shoulder pain and since I stared doing pushups, I feel great. But I don't know a good middle back (lats, right?) exercise. Besides I'm essentially lazy. I'd rather a 9-volt battery did my exercise for me while I blog. Is that so wrong? Hopefully I can find a gadget online to answer that.

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