Slendertone review – it's #tingletime!

When I was offered a chance to review a Slendertone product I thought it was time to have a go at my poor abused abs using the Slendertone System Abs Toning Belt Womens. After all, having children isn’t precisely good for that part of the anatomy (if you’ve never looked at a diagram at what happens to those muscles don’t, it’s really not pretty.) I rather wish, in hindsight, that I’d gone for the new face/ neck product, but hey, you live and learn.

The drawbacks, from my point of view, are fitting the regular session in to my routine. Finding half an hour clear when I’m not going to have a small person trying to help by removing the pads or twiddling the knobs is difficult when your small person has no discernible routine or indeed, need for sleep. I tried for evenings, and I tried to get a joint session going by tweeting about #tingletime with other reviewers, but ppl were strangely backwards in coming forwards. My theory about this is that unlike exercise, when you can seize the moral high ground and shout about your Dailymile, somehow using a gadget feels like cheating. Given that I’m doing the running anyway, I shouldn’t feel that way, but I did 🙁

In use, the belt is straightforward. I had to move up a program as level 1 really didn’t give me any sensation at all, so I bounced straight through to level 2 (there’s also a really good diary in the instruction manual to show you what is coming up and how to use the program). I found putting the belt on decidedly unpleasant, but only for the first moment – that cold wet sensation is not nice but it doesn’t last long. Odd, as I don’t recall the pads for a tens machine being anything like that, and I’d have assumed the technology was very similar. It comes with a sensible bag for keeping the whole lot in that I’d *really* recommend you use – trying to defluff a pad that a 1 year old has got to is not fun. 😳 All in all, this product is aimed at someone more organised and disciplined than me (which is probably 90% of the population tbh!) and while I have definitely lost some flab round the waist, it’s difficult to tell which of that is down to sitting going bzzt on an evening, and which is down to the 8 or more miles a week I’m running now.

Disclosure: this product was supplied free of charge for review purposes. If you’d like another point of view on it, you can check out the Men’s Slendertone system as reviewed by Daddacool.