‘Hey hey, have you seen my wife, I say hey hey, have you seen her?
She left me after a row, it was over a vacuum cleaner
I said ‘What’s wrong with a broom?’
and she said something obscener
‘Oh Mary, please come back and I’ll be you a vacuum cleaner’!

Here is my review of the Shake Weight.

It looks like a long dumbbell, except that weight is concentrated at the centre rather than at the ends, and there are springs between the ends of the weights and the centre part, so that if you shake it the ends are supposed to bounce back and force.

In principle, it is a good idea.

When you shake the weights, your muscles stay contracted, which is different to a normal dumbbell exercise – a bicep curl, for example – where you alternate between contracting and releasing the muscle.

In traditional workouts with dumbbells, after doing a normal set, people sometimes try to “fatigue the muscle” by performing the exercise only partway, so that the muscle never completely contracts, using very fast reps. The effect of the shake weight seems to be similar to this.

The Shake Weight comes with a DVD that has a 6 minute upper body video and a 10 minute total body video. In the upper body video, you alternate between shaking the Shake Weight and using it as a traditional dumbbell, with traditional exercises like bicep curls, shoulder presses and tricep extensions. This reminds me of the method of alternating between normal exercises and partial exercises to fatigue the muscle.

With the total body video, you do the upper body exercises while doing squats or lunges at the same time. The total body video also has two additional ab exercises: pilates-style situps where you extend the weight over your head and shake it as you sit up, and ab twists where you shake the weight while twisting from side to side.

The instructor also stops to stretch throughout the video, which I think is very good.

My main problem with the Shake Weight is that it is too light. At just 2.5 pounds, I found that there just wasn’t enough resistance to have any effect. I suppose if you have never lifted weights before, it would be fine to start off with a light weight like that, but eventually you are going to need to move up to heavier weights. (I’m a petite woman myself and don’t consider myself very strong, but even for me a 2.5 pound weight is too light.)

It looks like there is a Shake Weight for men, which weighs 5 pounds, but even that is probably too light for many women and probably too light for most men.

I’m also not happy with the marketing. The box says that you can get toned arms by working out with the Shake Weight for just 6 minutes a day. I’m sorry, but exercising for only 6 minutes a day is not going to make you toned. I wonder how many people are going to buy the Shake Weight, use it for 6 minutes a day without doing any other exercise or watching what they eat, then give up because they haven’t seen any noticeable improvements in their body.

In addition, the instructor is thin and very toned. I can’t believe that she got her body just by using a Shake Weight for 6 to 10 minutes a day. Unfortunately, I think that women are going to assume that they will be able to look like her just by doing that amount of exercise and no more, and not paying any attention to what they eat. Maybe these types of exercise videos should have disclaimers, in which the instructors with the great bodies have to reveal what exercises they really do and what their diets are like.