Can the chair gym get you fit while you watch telly?
When you have three teenagers, a dog, five chickens and a full-time job, it can be extremely tricky to find the time — or inclination — to exercise. I know I should be building muscle to protect my bones, tighten my sagging bottom and stop the flapping of my bingo wings, but there never seem to be enough hours in the day to book an exercise class, let alone attend one.
Which is why, I confess, I found the idea of the chair gym so appealing. Just imagine — a whole body exercise system that burns calories while you watch Strictly. It pretty much guarantees a firm six-pack, a cavernous thigh gap, the chiselled suck- cheeked look of a teenage selfie and — bonus — you can sit down to do it.
At £69, the chair gym costs little more than a month’s unused membership at the local sports centre and it doubles as a spare chair if you have an unexpected guest for dinner. The only device to top it would be a bed gym, but that hasn’t been invented yet.
So I place my order at Argos. When the chair arrives, my first thought is how scary and intimidating the pumpedup, body-built models on the box and the instructional DVD look.
This is quite a leap from the people I’ve seen doing chair workouts on the internet. Many of them sit because they can’t stand or because the chair puts them within easy reach of the fridge. That’s kind of what I had in mind.
The chair is a lightweight, metalframed folding seat, with stretchy resistance bands attached at each side, a footplate (so you can use your weight to hold it down) and foam-covered bars in place of a back rest.
There are two bands on each side which can be attached to clip-on handles or Velcro-fastening ankle straps, so you can switch between them to exercise your arms or legs alternately.
Depending on your strength, determination and the kind of bulging physique you crave, the handles and ankle straps can be clipped on the grey band to offer very gentle resistance (which feels like you’re lifting a couple of cans of baked beans), to the black band for medium resistance (like lifting a big plastic container of milk) or you can attach both bands at the same time for a muscle-man workout (I could barely make this one move at all).
Assembly involves tightening a few joints with an Allen key (that’s got to be at least 100 calories’ worth of an intensive wrist workout), and five minutes after it arrives the chair is ready and positioned in the middle of the sitting room directly in front of the TV.
My cunnIng plan is that the entire family ( graphic designer husband Jon, 51, and children Florence, 18, Isaac, 15, and greg, 13) will be unable to resist the temptation to strap themselves in for a quick bit of weight-training when they would otherwise be immobile — which is a lot. And I, of course, will never be off the thing and thereby be physically transformed within weeks.
The whole chair-gym ethos is a u.S.-led initiative to offer rehab to the elderly, the infirm and the overweight, but in our house it’s going to be a 24-hour on-call home gym and we will, I am convinced, be fighting for the chance to use it.
I lead by example, sit and pop in the instruction DVD, then watch in amazement as an unfeasibly musclebound Adonis (who looks as if he’s been lifting fridges rather than opening them) puts on his ‘happy face’ and goes through the motions of trying to convince me he got that body on this chair.
After 20 minutes of following the video instructions, my shoulder muscles are beginning to burn. That’s good.
I dutifully switch arms and change positions, standing up to march on the spot between exercises.
It is rather tedious to have to continually clip and unclip the handles, switching t hem f or the ankle straps and changing the bands (mild resistance for my bingo wings, medium resistance for my thunder thighs) and I only make it to the ad break in the Jeremy Kyle Show before I’m flagging. Suddenly, emptying the dishwasher becomes incredibly important.
But I do return to the chair the next day and brave my way through a 20- minute mini workout of exercises. There are so many different moves, from the ‘wood chop’ (swing the band diagonally from floor to ceiling across your body) to ‘glute-kickbacks’ (squeeze your buttocks as you pull your leg away against the resistance) — you could spend all day going through them. Or not.
I fear that’s the problem with any home exercise device — unless you’ve got an instructor shouting at you to ‘keep going’ it’s so, so easy to stop and walk away.
So I create fitness challenges for myself — ten bicep curls every time craig Revel horwood says ‘darling’, two sets of arm raises if one of my children uses the word ‘like’ unnecessarily, a weighted squat when my husband asks me where I’ve put something he’s lost.
But by the third day the children are sick of having to crane their necks to peer around the chair that they resolutely refuse to use and beg me to take it away.
To be fair it is not exactly an aesthetic addition to our decor. It looks like a spindly cross between a wheelchair, a torture rack, a commode and an electric chair. none of which are synonymous with health and vitality.
So for a week the chair gym replaces my office chair. As I spend at least ten hours a day in front of my computer, I’m convinced it will get me fit by a kind of osmosis.
I have great i ntentions and periodically lift my fingers from the keyboard to grab the handles and punch the air above my head or cross my tethered arms over my chest and bend forwards from the waist (an exercise that purports to build core strength).
FIRST wrapping the Velcro straps around my ankles, I bend and straighten my legs against the resistance as I work. Standing to take phone calls, I waft my tethered leg outwards and across to tighten and firm my hips and buttock muscles.
It’s not an ideal solution. The chair is too low for my desk and when I get particularly engrossed in a project I tend to forget my legs are tied up. When the post arrives, I am thrown into an unexpected flying press-up when I try to reach the door before the dog does, dragging the chair gym with me.
I proudly show my chair to my friend, a chartered physiotherapist, imagining she will be impressed by my obvious commitment to the body beautiful. She is dismissive and pulls a length of thick rubber band out of her handbag to show me how I can do the same exercises for £6 a strip (you thread the band under your dining room chair or secure it to the door with a knot tied on one end).
This, she says, has the advantage that you can hide it in a drawer when you finish, so ‘you don’t have your friends thinking you like a bit of kinky sex’. Ah, that.
There are certainly a few raised eyebrows when it’s my turn to host book club and I pull the chair up to the kitchen table. yes, we’ve all read Fifty Shades Of grey and yes, if you look, there are remarkably similar devices on the internet being sold for (I imagine) musclebuilding of a totally different kind.
I momentarily consider a bit of wifely multi-tasking: you could, in theory, liven up your love life by strapping your wrists and/or ankles i nto the chair and tone your abdominals, glutes and pectorals as you pull against the elastic bands in your feeble attempts to escape.
But the fantasy swiftly passes. I really don’t think the rickety device could withstand the weight of two corpulent adults and I would never be able to face the cleaner if she suspected we were getting grubby with the furniture.
So a month on, the husband, who pronounced the chair ‘a great idea’ when it arrived, hasn’t been close. I’m no nearer to sporting a six-pack and my chair gym languishes in the conservatory (our own ‘red room of pain’) with a dusty exercise bike, a set of kettle weights and a rather deflated exercise ball.
But there is an upside: it is a good flat surface on which to stack folded clothes when I’m ironing.
CHAIR gym, £69.99, Argos.