Running before you can walk – this seems to be a very real, and disturbing trend that everyone is moving towards. I see people buying specialized equipment before they master basic bodyweight exercises, or perform stupidly high reps of complex exercises before the technique has been mastered (CrossFit might have something to do with that). And trainers are spending time on stability, making their clients look like retards on Bosu balls instead of focusing on mobility first. As Eric Cressey recently stated in his latest TNation article,

“Today’s population grew up sitting too much, competing too much, and preparing too little, and they always, always, always got participation trophies. They de-evolved,”

So what’s the point of mentioning all this shit before a review? Simple – if you can’t manage simple, bodyweight push-ups, don’t even bother reading beyond this point. The IsoSHRED Dumbbells are the type of equipment that enhances a regular push-up. It takes what you’ve already mastered, then kicks you in the shin and makes you it’s little bitch so you have to start the mastery process all over again.

Product Name: IsoSHRED Pushup Dumbbells
MSRP: $129
Availability: Low (Website only currently)
Company: IsoSHRED Fitness
Risk Reversal: 30 Days

It is the brainchild of Michael – a United States Navy Seabees veteran/construction worker. Basically, he is a man that likes to get his hands dirty with physical work. In fact, Michael had no prior business or marketing experience so what did he do? Well instead of whining like most dudes that are sorry excuses for men, he self-taught himself the skills needed to set up a business, market and patent his vision into reality. Then he put his money where his mouth is an let me take it for a spin. Below is my experience with IsoSHRED.

Official Description

IsoSHRED Fitness Push Up Dumbbells are used like push up stands or push up bars.  The difference between IsoSHRED Push Up Dumbbells and other push up equipment such as, pushup stands or push up bars is they move in all directions just like push up rings to simulate chest dumbbell exercises, dumbbell fly exercises, cable fly exercises, and other free weight chest workouts using your body weight. 

IsoSHRED push up dumbbells take over where the perfect push up leaves off. Push up workouts with push up dumbbells are far more difficult because they require stabilization while doing push up type chest workouts.  Push Up Dumbbells are also more versatile than any other home push up equipment device.  They allow the user to complete abdominal  exercises much like ab wheel exercises and they engage more upper body muscles. 

With these push up bars, IsoSHRED Push Up Dumbbells, you will feel the difference in your chest, shoulders, lats, and abs from your first workout.  Don’t buy push up bars or the perfect push up, buy IsoSHRED Push Up Dumbbells.

If you have hit a plateau with your chest workout, Push Up Dumbbells are the perfect push up device for you.  Massive strength gains are possible because push up dumbbells make all of your muscles work together more efficiently. One user of this push up equipment reported an increase in their bench max of 40lbs from 265lbs to 305lbs in just 60 days. 

First Impressions

Personally, I love pushups, but when I was contacted about this product I was like “Oh boy, here we go, another push up bar-thing-device”. However, upon receiving them I was a little blown away by the build quality. Compared to other products I’ve tested before, this shit is built like a TANK. I mean, there is zero flex or give in it whatsoever. I had some heavy dudes stand on the dumbbells and we threw it against walls for fun. Give or take a few scratches this type of abuse will incur, the dumbbells are just as solid as the day they arrived.

This is a very good thing, since I’m not too fond of equipment that has too many moving parts (hence my hate for 95% of machines in commercial gyms). I’m not an engineer by trade, but anyone that knows anything about mechanics understands that the reliability of a product is inversely proportional to the amount of moving parts it has. Makes sense – the less shit you have moving around, the less shit there is to go wrong. Duh. But the IsoSHRED has a bunch of moving parts. So far though, it has held up well.

Next, they look pretty bad ass so I didn’t feel like a complete dork while using them. Win.

What struck me odd though, is that while they are shaped like dumbbells, they don’t weigh very much. So this means you can’t really use them like dumbbells. I don’t have the exact weight figure but it’s so little it’s negligible. This is a dream for shipping but useless for training.

I would have liked to see a bar protruding out from each end of the dumbbell where you could throw on standard weight plates. This would allow for some seriously awesome complexes and would really help during training.

Real World Results

For what it is designed to do, the IsoSHRED is second to none. The amount of stability you’ll need to do a pushup or even a pushup fly is ridiculous. The wheels are so smooth, your only saving grace is that the surface contact isn’t perfectly round, giving you a “bumpy” feel. Trust me, you want this.

The grips are also decently thick and highly comfortable to hold. What I really like is the seamless transition from pushups to ab-wheel type exercises. However, unlike a regular ab wheel which has the wheel in the center and forces you to balance it, the IsoSHRED is already balanced for you making it slightly less challenging.

One neat feature is how these dumbbells can not only roll side to side like a wheel, but up and down as well. This is due to the little rollers on the wheel and it works extremely well. The range of motion on a two dimensional surface is practically endless so you can do some really retarded pushups and feel like you got titty raped the next day. Awesome.

Things you cannot do with these (unless you want to become ugly): handstand pushups.  And once again, it bares repeating that you cannot use these as regular dumbbells. Which is unfortunate.

If you want to check out some of the advanced exercises you can do with these, check out the video below.

Conclusion

These things are a mixed bag, let’s take a look at what makes these dumbbells great and not so great…

Pros:

• One of the best push-up enhancing devices out there.
• Solid build quality – feels indestructible.
• Comfortable handles.
• HUGE range of motion on a flat surface.

Cons:

• Too light to be used as a regular dumbbell.
• Price

Let’s talk about the price for a second, since I usually don’t bother with that. There is no easy way to say this – for what you get, the IsoSHRED dumbbells are freakin’ expensive. However, back-track for a second and you can probably understand why they are priced as they are. It was developed by a single individual, who spent his own money on development, design, patent process (expensive as fuck) and marketing. While I’m never one to promote pity sales, you should think of this as an indie project.

This means your proceeds doesn’t go through some big middle man and actually end up in the pocket of the man that made it all happen. It’s exactly the same reason why I’ll support a new band I like by buying a concert ticket, and buying their albums directly from the merch table instead of buying it off iTunes where they won’t see jack shit of the sales. So if you’re interested in pushing your push-ups past the regular, give these a try.

Pics

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© 2012, By FitJerk. FitJerk.com is a division of Flawless Fitness Media – All Rights Reserved – No part of this post is to be republished without author consent under any forms of media (including print, internet, video or audio transcription). Doing so is a violation against copyright law and should be punishable by a punch to the face. All images are copyright of their respective owners.

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If there’s one thing that “As Seen On TV” products do well, its overhype and under-deliver. I mean it’s become a running joke in our generation that late night infomercials can be death to your wallet, and that’s what gets me. People still buy that shit in truck loads! So when I was asked to try Knockout Abs directly from the inventor, I was like “meh”. Also, I didn’t want to ruin his hopes and dreams since A) I’m very much into combat sports so if a product is being marketed towards fighters, it better live up to the hype or I’ll crush it with the might of my pen and B) I know how to get abs – and the secret isn’t in using ab machines.

Still, somehow he convinced me and I decided, why the hell not. Plus, pre-judging something isn’t my thing. At least, not usually. Below is the official description of Knockout Abs

Product Name: Knockout Abs
MSRP: $60
Availability: High

Straight From The Horse’s Mouth

KnockOut Abs(R) is the all new boxing ab workout machine with mma inspired moves that will rock your core and challenge every muscle in your body. Lose weight fast, sculpt your abs and obliques with this amazing as seen on tv ab machine complete with DVD.

The Backstory

[Note: If you’re just interested in the review itself, skip this section. But if you want to know how late night info marketing companies fuck shit up, read on]

I want to get into WHY I decided to give this thing a try – I mean all my friends were like “dude, an ‘As Seen On Tv’ product? You know that’s gona be shit, why bother?” And true enough, when I did a little research on Knockout Abs I laughed my ass off at it’s commercials. You have these bimbos and douchebags who clearly know nothing about boxing, hopelessly trying to punch a speedbag, but failing miserably. I’ve seen better timing in drunken bar fights.

So out of curiosity, I decided to dig a little deeper and as it turns out, the communication between the inventor (who shall not be named, for obvious reasons) and the marketing execs was non-existent.

The basic story goes like this: Man invents product over a decade ago and gets rejected for reasons that weren’t popular at the time (mma was non-existent and men in general weren’t buying shit off tv). Fair enough. Then, after a bunch of waiting, he notices the rise in combat sports and intelligently decides that ‘now is the time’ to get this product out there. He patents the thing (which is an expensive process) and get’s some sort of deal from a big-time marketing company. The detail of the deal is probably similar to something you see on Dragon’s Den but I didn’t dig too deep, so I don’t know who owned what percent of the company.

For half a year, inventor is left clueless about the product he came up with and then suddenly gets the call that they are shooting the infomercial. The investment made into shooting this infomercial was ridiculous from what he told me and from what I gathered personally, all the cash was spent in the WRONG areas. Instead of finding people who knew how to use a speedbag, they created an expensive set and hired a bunch of monkeys and hot chicks that looked good on camera – playing it safe by executing marketing 101.

Inventor realizes that he created the product for a different market (serious fighters and athletes) and that the infomercial is marketing this to every Joe Blow in America. But once so much money has been spent on shooting, a re-shoot is not possible. After the dust settles, the product (surprisingly) doesn’t do as well as intended and is stuck in a weird position. To people who train in combat sports, it looks like a fucking joke. To general North Americans, it looks like “another scam tv product”. So what to do? Inventor takes it upon himself to prove it’s the real deal and urges me to try it out.

Quite the story isn’t it? I still don’t understand why marketing guys think that throwing money on shit will instantly make it a success. All they had to do was make sure the guy who MADE the damn product was involved in the marketing process, but they didn’t. That’s like the marketing department of BMW selling the M3 (a sports car) as a comfortable, family saloon. It doesn’t matter how much money is thrown into marketing, if the message goes out to the audience, it won’t sell. Period.

So after hearing about this, I wanted to see if Knockout Abs really did get a bad rep or not. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I have any sympathy for the product, it’s inventor (who is a nice dude btw) or the marketing company. This is business and business is harsh, there’s no way around that. But it made for an interesting backstory. So, on with the actual review.

First Impressions

In the box you get the Knockout Abs system and a DVD. Now I was told by the inventor that the DVD was made by the marketing douches we talked about earlier and as such, he said he did not back the workouts listed. Therefore, I’ve decided to leave the DVD out of the review. I mean, it’s nice that it’s there but he’s working on making a new one. So on to the hardware itself.

My overall impression is that the construction is pretty sturdy. It’s mostly metal and rubber with very few plastics (thank god). It’s a bit on the hefty side but folds down nicely and can be tucked away under the bed or table. With the system, you get these two resistance bands which attach to the bottom of the seat. Oh and the seat itself is extremely comfortable and has a decent finish.

The anchor points are height adjustable and the speedbag is, I’m glad to say, a high quality piece of equipment. It can be detached so you can do similar drills that fighters use when swinging a medicine ball against a wall (See pics below).

Real World Results

The obvious question is, does it work? Well duh. And it works because it’s simple and builds upon a concept that is tried and true – bringing a general sit-up/crunch seat to your home. Gyms have had them for years and the only difference is that they anchor your ankles instead of your knees. And as I said earlier, the seat is very comfortable so as a general ab bench, it gets and A+ from me.

But this is not just an ab bench, so let’s get into some of faults… or should I say “fault” as there really is only one. The resistance bands. Not only is their placement completely ridiculous for punching, but it can probably teach you bad technique. The problem lies in the angle. The angle of the resistance pushes your punches DOWN instead of back. If you read my review of the MASS SUIT, it had the exact same problem.

The solution to this would be dead simple – place the anchor points at the back of the seat, so the bands come around over your traps. And it would be nice if you could order this thing with a choice of resistance as the bands that I got had the tension of overcooked spaghetti strings. Hardly useful.

Still, the good news is that the speedbag is awesome. You can’t time your punches as fast as you can on a regular speed bag since this is spring based, but you can still get one helluva workout. You can also elbow the shit out of it and my personal favorite – practice slipping. I’m not sure if this was a design flaw or intentional but if you punch this thing hard while sitting upright, it can come back and smack you in the chin, which makes it perfect for punching and slipping (known as dodging, for those that don’t know boxing terminology). My favorite combo would be to punch hard, slip, sit-up and elbow. Then do the other side and repeat till I felt like puking. Excellent.

I even asked a buddy of mine, who actually trains with world class boxers to try it out. To my surprise, he had good things to say about it as well. Praise doesn’t come any higher than that.

Conclusion

So while the resistance bands aren’t exactly useful, Knockout Abs does what the inventor intended – gives you a decent ab workout while also providing a nice speedbag for home use. And it tucks away nicely under your bed to boot. So, should you buy one? Well that’s when the price comes into play. For $60, it’s a product that sits on the fence. If you have no equipment and no gym membership then there’s no point. This will not give you a full body workout. I mean it can, but you can only do so much with a specialized piece of equipment.

On the other hand, if you’re into combat sports and already have a training program in place and want to either take things to the next level or just want to challenge yourself differently, then I say go ahead. You won’t be disappointed with the product quality, I can say that much with confidence. I put this thing through hell and besides some odd scuffs and scratches, it’s performing just fine. I give it 3.9 stars outta 5 in it’s current state. However, if the price ever drops to $40, and you can get better bands, I’d easily give it a 4.5 and there would be no reason why every home gym shouldn’t have one for comfortable, weighted crunches.

Update: The inventor told me that he’s planning on ditching the bands as their inclusion wasn’t his call. The marketing exces threw it in there because they felt like it. Go figure. 

Pics

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© 2012, By FitJerk. FitJerk.com is a division of Flawless Fitness Media – All Rights Reserved – No part of this post is to be republished without author consent under any forms of media (including print, internet, video or audio transcription). Doing so is a violation against copyright law and should be punishable by a punch to the face. All images are copyright of their respective owners.

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In the pursuit to become strong, fast and athletic, we humans have come up with some pretty radical solutions to add resistance and make training increasingly challenging. The king of all resistance forces is and always will be gravity, or should I say, working against gravity. It’s in our DNA. It’s what has influenced the structure of our bodies and the way you look. If you’re butt-ugly, now is your chance to blame this universal force… along with your parents for good measure.

However, there is one big limitation to gravity – it works in only one direction. What a bitch, huh? This is where MASS SUIT comes into play. It attaches to your body and using resistance bands, provides resistance in almost every imaginable direction. When you put it on, you feel like you’re part of a physiological experiment… which is pretty cool. Let’s see what the company as the say.

Product Name: Mass Suit
Company: Juke Performance Inc.
MSRP: $299.95
Availability: Low (From company only as far as I can tell)

Official Description

The MASS suit is a unique patented design used by many professionals to provide resistance training to your entire body by using rubber resistance bands. The resistance starts as soon as you clip the bands while just standing before doing any type of athletic movement. The MASS Suit increases the resistance to your shoulders, arms, back, core, hip flex, quads, and hamstrings by attaching the MASS sleeves, straps and rubber cords to your body, elbows, hands, knees, and feet. This will create more speed, strength, power, stamina, fast twitch muscles and a more grounded stable balance while cutting calories and losing weight. By intensifying your training you will increase the levels of your red blood cells which will amplify your endurance and muscle speed.

Your breathing will also increase and that will create more oxygen intake and that too will help multiply red blood cells for increased stamina and power. The unique design of the MASS Suit is ideal for every type of athlete in every sport to intensify their training routine. The MASS Suit is adjustable which will able you to increase or decrease in resistance depending on how strong or fatigued you are. As your body adapts to your workouts and you need to pick up and push your conditioning, the MASS Suit will intensify your training up to 75% by adding more resistance to your punches, elbows, kicks, knees and core.

First Impressions

I usually get a lot of emails from companies asking me to test out their “revolutionary” new product. Well here’s a surprise – most of them aren’t. This though, had me more excited than a fat kid who discovered a stale oreo under his couch. I saw that champs such as Anderson Silva were using it to improve their game so surely, it must be something special because let’s face it, whether you’re a fight fan or not, The Spider Silva is the shit!

But it’s not just the MMA application which put a huge grin on my face. I saw that it could be used with other sports such as swimming, football, basketball etc. It’s customization options were practically limitless. Awesome.

Once it arrived, I was glad to see it came in a handy little gym bag. it’s a perfect fit and doesn’t look cheesy as hell unlike other branded products you might have to carry around. Inside you get a brochure, manual and some instructions – which you’ll need because putting this on for the first time is a pain in the ass. Partially because there are a few different variations of the suit and the instructions you get inside the box aren’t exactly the same as the product you receive. Either way, help was just an email away but I would like to see consistency across the board.

Once you manage to get on the basics such as the chest vest, elbow wrap, ankle boots and knee wraps, it’s time to attach the bands. Again, if it’s your first time then I would highly recommend some third party assistance since once you start piling on the resistance, you’ll move like you walked out of the special needs gym class.

It feels… different. Almost every action you take requires wayyy more effort than you would regularly want to put in. This includes, walking, sitting, grabbing, reaching etc. The website claims you can easily conceal this under clothing and burn extra calories doing normal daily activities. Uh, bullshit. The only way you’re going to conceal this is if the clothes you buy are twice your normal size and more baggy than a thugged out wankster.

Real World Results

I’m going to start off with disappointments and possible suggestions to anyone listening from the company since that’s how I like to roll. First up, this “once size fits all” thing is stupid. I realized that anyone at 140lbs or less (which is me during summer time) is in for a watered down experience. When you “suit up”, the straps are all maxed out and sticking out, which makes you look like you’re peeling black Velcro skin from every angle. Then there’s the problem of resistance. See, Mass Suit relies on bands which provide a challenge when stretched. So the resistance my training partner felt (who is taller and weighs about 30lbs more) was much higher than the resistance I felt.

So I almost felt cheated since I would be paying to make my training more challenging, but I’d end up feeling 2/3 of the resistance a man slightly taller than me would feel. Uncool. I suggest that the Mass Suit come in two sizes, small and large. No need for medium since the straps are adjustable and should easily cover that range of people.

Next is the issue of comfort. If you’re planning on suiting up with just a light T-shirt and shorts, I’d think twice because after just a 15 minute kickboxing session, my training partner had marks left over from the plastic part of the straps (see pic below). This isn’t a huge deal at first, but if you’re planning on using this suit 3 or even 4 times a week, expect to get rashes. Of course, this can all be mitigated by wearing long sleeves and pants. I found that the Under Armour type of material is an excellent option to use with Mass Suit. It also makes you look incredibly sexy.

Other than those two shortcomings, it’s pretty much uphill from there. You can ditch the elbow and the handles for resistance for sports that just need your lower body such as soccer, basketball etc. Or you can attach everything and go full out. The only thing I would say is that when doing kickboxing (which is a huge push for this product) the angle of resistance that you get from the handles isn’t optimal. It attaches to your hips, which means it pulls your hands DOWN. The force vector of a punch is pretty much perpendicular to the body, therefore the resistance should be in the complete opposite direction (attached to the shoulders). For this reason, I don’t recommend you train punches with the handles, just leave the elbow bands attach and that’s good enough.

When it comes to KICKS however, it’s all aces. Everything is in the right spot to provide some serious challenge to your front, round and side kicks. I’ve thrown together a video below where I’m helping my trainer partner perfect the explosiveness of his kicks. As you’ll probably notice, he looks a little awkward doing them since it was his first time with the Mass Suit. After some practice though, he was kicking almost as fast as he used to, and when the suit came off, we found some untapped power coming from his legs. His hands did pretty well too.

Besides combat sports, I tried this with soccer and gymnastics. For soccer you can just leave the upper body bands to the side and get a serious workout running around with the knee and ankle bands. Since my bike had a flat ass tire, I couldn’t really test it thoroughly but I can definitely see it as a useful tool for the tools that love biking in their tight pieces of clothing. Couple that up with some uphill pedaling and you’ve got yourself a challenge, my friend.

Then there is gymnastics. When it comes to tumbling and floor skills, it’s only useful some of the time because there are certain tricks that involve your body to contract instead of expand making the bands useless.  But for events such as rings, parallel bars and vault I can see it come in handy since you need to hit the handstand position quite often, and the Mass Suit is fucking awesome for handstands. I was going to throw it on some of the high level male gymnasts that train at my gym but these guys just weren’t big enough for it to be of any use. Oh well.

And obviously, besides using the suit for sport-specific training, you can use the Mass Suit during your normal gym session as well. It’ll add some extra pain to your squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses etc. One of my favourites with the Mass Suit was the seated dumbbell clean and press. Shit was tough as hell and the bands helped me get past my plateau and add 10lbs to each side in a few weeks. I was more explosive too… can’t complain with those results.

Conclusion

So the Mass Suit is pretty effective most of the time, but is for you? Well if you’re a smaller person, do recreational sports and have no money then no, it ain’t. You’re better off spending the 300 bones on a year’s worth of gym membership fees and training hard against gravity. However, for the serious athlete that has done everything under the sun and needs the extra edge to get ahead, I would say it’s a pretty hefty but worthwhile investment. I’m talking college/NFL level football players, college/NBA level basketball players, professional fighters, national/international level soccer players, competitive Olympic weightlifters etc.

Overall I was quite impressed with the Mass Suit and will give it 4/5 stars. It works great and I love the innovation but it’s got some kinks to work out such as comfort, proper sizing and that price could use a drop as well. I’m going to give it my…

…I haven’t given these out in a while but I figured the Mass Suit is pretty deserving. If you’re a serious athlete, I’d give this piece of equipment a try. It’ll take a few tries to get used to but once you do, it’ll serve you well.

- FitJerk

Pictures

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© 2011 – 2012, By FitJerk. FitJerk.com is a division of Flawless Fitness Media – All Rights Reserved – No part of this post is to be republished without author consent under any forms of media (including print, internet, video or audio transcription). Doing so is a violation against copyright law and should be punishable by a punch to the face. All images are copyright of their respective owners.

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