If you hear “fitness” and think “watching online streaming video”, it’s because you’ve passed the critical weight beyond which all words sound like “nacho time.” Getting fit with YouTube is like building a Space Shuttle with butter, but lacks the same amount of genuine effort. And ]]>

If you hear “fitness” and think “watching online streaming video”, it’s because you’ve passed the critical weight beyond which all words sound like “nacho time.” Getting fit with YouTube is like building a Space Shuttle with butter, but lacks the same amount of genuine effort. And as with all things, the internet can even take “get fit by watching things” and make it even worse:

1. The Insanity Workout

Shaun T’s Insanity Workout is the perfect storm of everything wrong with infomercial exercises: starting by promising physical reconditioning beyond the means of a plastic surgeon’s genie, it moves through the craptiest pseudoscience we’ve ever seen (which is literally “We turn this regular workout graph – UPSIDE DOWN!”*) and focuses entirely on a single advantage – being shouted at by a muscled psycho – which doesn’t actually work with a DVD workout.

*Not making this up. They do that.

We didn’t surrender the detonators when we watched Die Hard, and no matter how many times we watch Full Metal Jacket we’re neither marines nor dead. When Shaun T’s on your TV screaming at you to dig deep within yourself and starts calling you a pussy, you’re going to be in the kitchen digging deep into the fridge before he can even call you a quitter.

2. The 24-hr Ghetto Workout

The 24-hr ghetto workout is advertised “for people who can’t afford a gym pass,” and recommends that those people start getting shirtless and hanging around playgrounds, public utilities, bus-stops and other people’s cars. So it’s either filmed in the most harmonized city in America, or it’s an attempt to give every single practitioner full access to the famously effective penal system gyms.

You try getting half-naked and using another man as a lever on a stranger’s car. And when you’re doing pushups on a bus-stop in the middle of the day, you might as well walk into the local precinct house and start doing crunches on the booking desk.

3. Steve Maxwell Kettlebell Workouts For Real Men

If there’s one thing you learn from infomercials, it’s that you’re only one overpriced hunk of recycled metal away from being Schwarzenegger’s bigger brother. If you were capable of learning two things you wouldn’t be listening to infomercials. The latest special shape of scrap which will magically reach into your muscles and flick the “not a fatass” switch is the kettlebell. Steve Maxwell uses every possible trick to make that sound manly instead of something that rings when your tea is ready. Steve Maxwell is, unfortunately, not very smart, so when he wants “manly” you get this:

That’s two kettlebells with pictures of himself, a man, on them. He forgot to check if people would want to look at him first, and the “manly” falls down with the cut-off unitard on the left. Despite workout names like “Walking The Bear” and “The Crusher”, which sound more like popular YouTube clips of people mangling themselves, the video can’t hide how a kettlebell is basically a regular weight with a handle designed for large handbags and making refreshing non-alcoholic drinks.

4. Hawaii Chair

Behold this office environment:

Now imagine that the woman is relentlessly gyrating her crotch in a constant 360 degree circle without moving the rest of her body, grinning like she’s being held at gunpoint in demented determination to pretend she doesn’t notice. Now imagine that a 2800 rpm motor has been installed underneath her ass to make sure this keeps happening. It’s not Japanese porn, that’s actually what’s happening to victims of the “Hawaii Chair.”

This chair promises to “take the work out of your workout”, and like every product to claim fitness is effort-free has less exercise value than hitting “Speeddial: Pizza”. It actually damages your life, and ability to stand, by expecting you to function like in an office environment while your crotch is cyclically thrust at everything in the room every second of the day. Unless you’re working in Hugh Hefner’s bathrobe-invoicing department that isn’t going to cut it. It cunningly sidesteps clauses of the Geneva convention clause prohibiting connecting people to a mains-powered device designed to twist their spine: that only applies to people imprisoned by war, not minimum wage.

5. Lots of pushups

This one almost doesn’t belong here because it would actually work. Do this workout every day and you will definitely notice changes: do a pushup per second for eight minutes every day and you’ll be fitter or dead.

Hopefully your single minded dedication to the Zen of Pushup will leave you some money to actually buy things for your house, unlike Mike, and the sense not to upload a techno-trance video of you turning your own body into an organic piston for the better part of ten minutes. Then again, when Mike finally reaches Pushup-vana and becomes one with all biceps through time and space we’ll have to ask his permission every time we want to use our arms.

6. BLAKE ADAMS!

BLAKE ADAMS will show you his country workout! BLAKE ADAMS starts every segment reassuring you that it’s still him, BLAKE ADAMS! BLAKE ADAMS’ idea of a workout is running through the backwoods of Alabama, hurling full-size fire-axes into things, and shouting “Woooo!” BLAKE ADAMS had to film that bit himself because no-one will come into the woods with him! BLAKE ADAMS makes you very glad you’re watching this from very far away!

This is followed by climbing vines, balancing on logs, and cartwheels as bad as they can physically be without putting you in hospital. A girl turns up later, but considering how she makes fun of a man whose #1 hobby is “embedding axes into things” while deep in the forest it’s not going to take CSI if she suddenly disappears.

But to be honest: BLAKE ADAMS is awesome and we actually love him. He’s having approximately one million times more fun than everyone else on this list put together, and he made the video with the sheer demented joy of a seven-year old hanging from a drain pipe and shouting “Look! Look!” Godspeed, BLAKE ADAMS, and may your axeblades never dull.

7. Chyna More Than Meets The Eye

WWF’s “Chyna: More Than Meets The Eye” starts with the incredible misapprehension that people want to look at Chyna and manages to get worse, with the staggering idea that “people want to look like Chyna.” Apparently the lack of steroids and skin-leathering facilities at the average spa were beneath their notice.

Of the seven “fans” they rounded up there is not one straight man, but – by mass – there are ten women and two homosexuals. We’re not sure if they were into girls before they saw Chyna, but they’re definitely homosexual now. The small ad above is actually the only video available anywhere online from the portal of horror that is the hour long VHS tape. We’re assuming that when anyone attempts to upload a copy, their computer explodes to kill the traitor and protect mankind.