Did you know that this simple exercise gadget has sold $1 billion in units?

Looking back, it is hard to believe that this thing has been around for over 25 years. I don't really recall seeing them until the early 2000's but now they are just so common that it is kind of assumed that any gym or even your own house, is going to have one of them.

They cost next to nothing so why not?

I knew they had sold a lot of them but since it is such a simple machine I wouldn't have guessed that the company that had the patent on it at first has raked in over a billion dollars in sales.

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I've owned several of these things and one of them that looks just like this only the color is different, is sitting on my floor right now. I've had other variations of it in the past as well including one that looked like a rollerblade - which was completely unnecessary and nearly resulted in me crushing my face when one of the handles snapped off, and one that had an "up-assist" on it that made the rolling back up motion easier. The up assist one was particularly dumb in my mind because honestly, if you can't do that part of it, you shouldn't be doing the other part of it.

Ab-rollers are not that hard unless you try to overdo it and extend your arms too far in front of your body.

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From this position it is actually quite difficult to get all the way back up but hell, you are already there so if you have carpeting or a floor mat you can just lie down if you aren't feeling up to it.

From what I have read there is some danger with these machines but I don't think there is any conclusive proof of this danger being very real. I'm not saying that nobody has ever hurt their back doing this but at the same time traditional situps, the likes of which they have you do in the military or what I did in gym class with someone else kneeling on your feet, has been proven to be damaging to your lumbar because of pressure being put on it by the ground in the motion that you are doing.

With an ab-roller the pressure is still there and I am sure there is also some danger. If you want to completely eliminate any chance of injury, I guess don't work out and just be a fat ass. I think that if you are doing an exercise and you feel pain that isn't like a muscle burn, stop doing that until you can investigate how to do it properly.

ATHLEAN-X is a very good source of workout information. There's a reason why he has 14 million subs on YouTube after all, even though he is a bit long-winded.

This wasn't meant to be an instructional post though. I think that anyone can basically figure this thing out on their own and despite the loads of warning videos out there I feel as though that is to create hype or generate traffic for their own pages or channels rather than being a genuine fear. If this machine was screwing up the backs of most or even some of its users, you wouldn't be allowed to buy it in USA. Simple as that.

The point was, I can't believe that this thing, which is just a wheel with handles on it managed to make a BILLION dollars in sales.

I wonder if those strange roller-skate creatures form the Wizard of Oz sequel had anything to do with how this became a thing

I don't recall these things ever being more than say $30 each and I have seen generic ones, i'm guessing since the patent expired that are just $5 or so. I'm not a math teacher, but if we average that out to $25 each, that means that 40 million ab rollers are kicking around out there somewhere in the world. I'm guessing that the total sales are only for the original company as well, the copycats? if we were to factor these things in as well, the overall figure is probably more like half a billion devices. Who know?

Do you own one? Do you use it? What do you think?