Since being released onto the exercise market earlier this year, the Ab Circle Pro has had a real combination of reviews, ranging widely from customers who absolutely loved it to those who would cheerfully chuck it in the garbage.
If it was a contender on Dancing with the Stars it would have been in the bottom two more times than I care to name; always however just managing to scrape through into the next round.
So what’s it all about? Is the Ab Circle Pro as good or as bad as they say it is and does it work at all? The answer to this is to keep things in perspective; it can be as useful as any other fitness machine in that it may actually get people to do some exercise on a regular basis.
The idea behind it is good, as the all-fours positioning makes it much easier to work the muscles of the waist and sides correctly without putting strain on the back or the neck, which up to now was the major problem with trying to tone and shape the abdominal area. What isn’t so good, however, is the build quality and the customer service (although the latter has recently improved).
What people seem to forget all the time is that you simply cannot target just one area to try and lose fat, as weight loss and reshaping your body is a combination of several things, including various different types of exercise and altering your eating habits. That is the only thing that is going to work in the medium and long-term.
Look at it this way; if you crash diet but don’t exercise – sure, you’ll lose weight. But it won’t be fat, mainly muscle – which is the one thing that you truly need to get and sustain weight loss. Added to that, you will feel as hungry as a wolf and as grumpy as a bear and as soon as you give up in disgust and go back to eating the way you were before, the weight will pile back on – this is what the billion-dollar diet industry relies on.
Then there are the people who do a little exercise (for a while anyway) but don’t overhaul their eating habits as well. In their case they lose a little bit of weight and tone up a little, but because they are still eating too much they don’t get the results they want so they decide that Exercise Doesn’t Work and go back to being a couch potato. Deep down we all know what the answer is — eat a little less and move around a little more. Problem is, we don’t really want to do it for various reasons, the main one being that it’s too damned hard!
The secret is to make small changes – start with a few minutes exercise a day and a few less calories a day until you get accustomed , and then make more changes. In this respect, the Ab Circle Pro will come in very useful. If you use it three times a week for 10 minutes and add in other different types of exercise (such as an aerobics or step class, a few brisk walks and maybe some swimming), plus some weights exercises to tone your muscles, then you will achieve good results.
As I mentioned earlier, most of the complaints that I have heard are in regard of the quality of the Ab Circle Pro and frankly, it isn’t great; the kneepads can split and the wheels squeak, although many people have told me that wearing kneepads and the judicious application of WD40 does the trick nicely.
The bottom line is that you get what you pay for, and it stands to reason that a machine costing under $200 (plus S&H) is not going to be as well-built, tough and hard wearing as a treadmill that costs five times that much. But that being said, I believe the Ab Circle Pro is very useful as part of a weight loss plan and is nowhere near as ugly and bulky as a treadmill!