Does The Shake Weight Really Work

One fitness product that has become a center of media attention recently is the Shake Weight. This is a hand-held dumbbell like weight with a spring on either end that you can shake. The claim is that this can help women get that lean, toned, un-bulky look to their arms and shoulders.

The Shake Weight became famous after being mentioned on several TV shows, most notably the Ellen Degeneress show. Most of the TV time this product got was slightly on the comic side due to the slightly suggestive infomercial, but this says nothing about the quality and effectiveness of the product itself, so I am going to disregard it for the purposes of this article.

Here are the claims of the Shake Weight:

• The Shake Weight works with a method called Dynamic Inertia in which you work your muscles by shaking the weight instead of lifting it.
• That a scientific study showed that this product is more effective than regular weight training in many aspects. I tried to find reference to the study on their website but couldn't so I don't know who conducted this research and what the exact findings were.
• That you can get terrific results in just 6 minutes a day.

I don't know anything about Dynamic Inertia as this is a concept that I believe was born with the invention of the Shake Weight. Shaking an object certainly works the muscles, of that there is no doubt. Even shaking your arms in front of you without nothing in them does produce some stimulation.Whether this stimulation is more effective than traditional weight lifting is an open question. This is something that's very hard to measure as weight training can be done in so many fashions and variations that a simple comparison is just not accurate.

There is one claim which I doubt is true and that refers to how the Shake Weight can help women get that long muscle growth instead of the bulky one which men prefer. The infomercial suggests that using traditional weight training machines and dumbbells is what causes bulky muscle growth.

The real cause is genetics and the way you workout. Most women aren't built, genetically, to bulk up. They will have to train with very heavy weights and work extremely hard to get the bulky look. You can achieve a long, more feminine, muscle tone with dumbbells and machines. There is nothing wrong with them.

So, the Shake Weight may be a fun product to use, and it certainly be used at home pretty easily, but it's not better than dumbbells in producing lean muscle growth. That being said, this product does look like a lot of fun and may prove to be a new way to workout.