The ThighMaster: A Glorified Door Spring with Foam Padding That Suzanne Somers Squeezed Into a $100 Million Empire

The ThighMaster is a spring. I want to establish this clearly because the marketing spent thirty years trying to convince you it's something more. It is not something more. It is a spring — specifically, a bent piece of spring steel covered in foam padding, with two padded grips at the ends. You put it between your thighs. You squeeze. The spring resists. Your thighs, allegedly, become toned.

This is the entire product. A spring. With foam. That you squeeze with your legs while watching television, sitting in a chair, lying in bed, or standing in your living room at 2 AM wondering how your life arrived at this particular intersection of infomercial persuasion and inner-thigh desperation.

The ThighMaster was introduced in 1991 and endorsed by Suzanne Somers, who had been famous for playing Chrissy on Three's Company and would go on to become the most prolific infomercial spokesperson in American history. Somers appeared in ThighMaster ads wearing a leotard, squeezing the device between her sculpted thighs with the focused intensity of someone defusing a bomb, and smiling — always smiling — as if the act of squeezing a spring was the source of all human joy.

The product sold over 10 million units. It generated over $100 million in revenue. And it is based on "spot reduction" — the theory that exercising a specific body part reduces fat in that specific area — which exercise scientists have debunked so thoroughly and so repeatedly that disproving it has become a rite of passage for kinesiology students.

You cannot squeeze fat off your thighs any more than you can do sit-ups to burn belly fat or blink rapidly to lose weight from your eyelids. The body doesn't work that way. The ThighMaster worked anyway — financially, if not physiologically.

The Vision: What If Your Thighs, but Better, Through Squeezing?

The ThighMaster's appeal was the promise of targeted transformation with minimal effort. You didn't need a gym. You didn't need a trainer. You didn't need to change your diet or your lifestyle or your relationship with the concept of exercise. You just needed to squeeze a spring while doing other things — watching TV, reading, sitting at your desk — and your thighs would transform from whatever they were into whatever Suzanne Somers' thighs were.

The ads were masterful. Somers, age 44 when the product launched and looking approximately 44 times more fit than the average American, squeezed the ThighMaster with effortless grace and attributed her physique to this $20 spring. The implication was clear: if you buy this, you will look like this. The reality was that Somers maintained her physique through a comprehensive fitness and diet regimen that the ThighMaster was, at best, a prop in.

The ThighMaster provided light resistance to the adductor muscles — the inner thigh muscles that bring your legs together. This is a real muscle group. The resistance was real. The exercise was real. What was not real was the premise that squeezing this particular spring for five minutes a day would produce visible changes to the shape, size, or tone of your thighs.

Exercise physiologists have consistently found that light resistance training of a single muscle group does not produce visible muscle definition or fat loss in that area. You would need to squeeze the ThighMaster for the caloric equivalent of a real workout — approximately several thousand squeezes per session — to burn enough calories to matter, at which point your inner thighs would be less "toned" and more "screaming."

The Glorious User Experience

Donna from Sacramento, CA — ★☆☆☆☆

"I used the ThighMaster every night while watching Seinfeld for an entire season. Twenty-two episodes. Approximately sixteen hours of squeezing. My thighs remained unchanged. Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer provided more emotional exercise than the ThighMaster provided physical exercise. I now own a ThighMaster that lives behind my bed and a deep familiarity with the early works of Larry David. One of these improved my life."

Mark from Atlanta, GA — ★☆☆☆☆

"I bought my wife a ThighMaster for her birthday in 1993, which I now recognize as one of the worst gift decisions in marital history. The subtext of giving someone a ThighMaster is 'I have concerns about your thighs,' which is not a birthday message that strengthens a marriage. She used it twice. It lived in the garage for six years. It appeared at our garage sale for $1. Nobody bought it at $1. We gave it away. The person we gave it to looked reluctant."