"Human dumbbells"

Thelondonpaper

I ran across this blog post over at RW Daily about a gym where the "iron pumps you." The Londonpaper reports a gym called Gymbox which now offers human dumbbells as an alternative to traditional dumbbells. The proposed idea behind this was to give demotivated cityworkers an idea of what they were lifting. That and to motivate them to pump more iron!

These "human dumbbells" come in various sizes and weights (pictured above) with an optional "motivation feature" in which they yell out words of encouragement to ensure the best maximization of their workout as the gym-goer's request. Examples of words are not given in the article, so who knows whether it's positive or negative words shouted. I wonder how the "human dumbbells" would feel if the gym-goer requested mean, demeaning things to say?

The Gymbox owners says, "We’re going to closely monitor the performance of our members and are optimistic that they will see better results from their work outs with our new human weight machine than they have seen with normal equipment."

I'm all for visualization of some things, and know it can be very useful. However, this seems a bit invasive? But then again, maybe that's just due to my private nature of working out. Maybe a better word is bizarreness. Thoughts?