Are Shakeweights a Better Arm Workout than Dumb Bells or is That Claim “Shakey”? July 9, 2012 Go Art

A clearly defined pattern in the fitness market exists currently. Most any new product that comes out will put a greater emphasis on trying to save the user’s time.

This will also inevitably create direct comparisons to well-known and more established workout methods that we know does take time. In my opinion, advertisers who take this route do run some risks. The biggest of those risks being they will create immediate skeptics of users who are trained to believe there are no short-cuts to looking great.

A recent highly successful workout that I thought did a good job of walking that line effectively was P90X. The advertisements promised results in a set period of time, but also made it clear that you you’d work like you probably never worked before to get there. The gamble was obvious: Tempt people with results and hope that feeling of empowerment and excitement overwhelms our natural aversion to hard work.

One key thing to note is that P90X didn’t seek to avoid traditional workouts in the marketing pitch, rather it held itself out as having a smarter system and order of doing the work.

Shakeweightsfrom Fitness IQ is going about creating a message differently.  Shakeweights is a simple concept that attempts to borrow the idea of hard painful work being the path, but at the same time telling everyone that there are faster easier ways to achieve great upper body results.

Shakeweights plays itself off against traditional longer dumb-bell oriented workouts (like P90X) and says it can get you ripped, powerful muscles in 6 minutes a day.  Looking at some of the reviews, I would say there are two ways to answer the question of whether it succeeds.

First, know that Shakeweights is a program that relies on the user to modify the intensity of the “shaking” movement to increase results. Programs like this can often get improperly utilized through either lack of intensity or improper form.  It is likely that many of the positive reviews are from people who are in tuned enough with their body and able to make the choice to push themselves in a productive and safe way.

Second, whether someone has had success with Shakeweights seems to depend on their fitness entry point. Very fit people, might not consider it challenging enough.  The best thing I can say is to look at the Shakeweights Pro with the 3 settings adjustments to step ladder the intensity.