Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi. I'm Marshall Brain with today's question. Do these power balance wrist bands that you see on TV actually work or is this a scam? If you watch certain channels on TV, you have been bombarded with ads for power balance wrist bands and people have been buying them. The band is supposed to immediately improve your strength, flexibility,
and balance by working with your body's electrical field. There's all kinds of stuff about the natural resonant frequency of your body, and you know the amazing things that happen when you get your body in tune with nature and so on. That's the pitch, and there have been many celebrity endorsements as well, everything for basketball players to horse jockeys have one tournaments or one races using the power Balance wristband. If you look at the ads on YouTube,
you can see the hype. There's all kinds of stuff about how great this thing is, as well as some really convincing demonstrations. For example, they'll have a person stand on one leg with their arm outstretched and press on their arm and obviously the person falls over. But then they'll have them hold this power balance wristband. Do the same thing again, and now when someone presses down on their arm, they stand there firmly. There's no loss of balance.
It looks like a miracle. There's also tests of strength that are demonstrated and tests of flexibility. The person is asked to rotate their torso as far as they can. Then they're given the power balance wristband and they can rotate even further. So it appears that this actually works. So what's going on. It turns out that this is not the first time that this particular picular scam has been perpetrated. This thing has been going on for a
long time. It's really just a carnival trick, and you can find videos on YouTube that will show you what's going on. Let's take the balance test for example, when the person stands on one foot and the salesman comes and knocks him off balance simply by pressing on his arm, that's obvious. The person really is just pressing on his arm, or maybe pressing on the arm with a little outward pressure to draw him off balance more quickly. That's what you would expect to happen when they have the subject
hold that wrist band. However, they press down on the arm and they apply a little bit of extra force towards the center of the person's body. Instead, that moves that forced towards the person's center of gravity, and obviously they're not going to fall over anymore. So if you're watching the demonstration, you can't see this subtle shift in the angle that the pressure being applied, and the person who's holding the wristband isn't going to feel it either,
because there's no easy way to measure it. But that subtle shift in the direction of force on the person's arm is enough to determine whether they fall over or whether they stand firmly with that wrist band in their hand. The same kind of thing is happening with the strength test, and it's even happening with the flexibility test. And that's just a funny thing about your body. If you tell your body to rotate the torso as far as it can in a certain direction, it's only gonna go so far, obviously.
But the thing about your body is if you just hold that position for a couple of seconds and then try it again, you'll be able to stretch further. Your muscles have gotten you know, stretched out a little bit, there's a little more freedom, and you can always add a couple more degrees to it. If they hand you the wristband in that interval of time when the muscles are relaxing and so on, they're going to be able
to show you that you have more flexibility. But you would have had that flexibility with or without the wrist band. It's just a carnival trick. Now. The great thing is that regulators finally caught up with the company and the company has been forced to admit that this really is a scam. If you go to their website, you can find this notice. In our advertising, we stated that power
Balance wrist bands improved your strength, balance and flexibility. We admit that there's no credible scientific evidence that supports our claims, and therefore we engaged in misleading conduct in breach of section fifty two of the Trade Practices Act of n four. If you feel that you've been misled by our promotions, we wish to unreservedly apologize and offer a full refund.
So Power Balance wrist bands don't work. That has been proven with videos and lots of demonstrate and now it's also been admitted by the company, so you don't need to spend your money on this. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.