SoraNews24 reporter Ahiru Neko is now Mecha Ahiru Neko!

2020 is just two months away and we’re…honestly a little disappointed. So many of the things science fiction media was promising us by that once far-off date are still nowhere in sight. Where are our flying cars? Our pill-sized seven-course gourmet meals? Our strap-on futuristic exoskeletons?

Oh, wait, what’s that? Not only is that last one a real thing now, we just got one delivered in a package to SoraNews24 headquarters?

Yes indeed. Just days after we first found out about manufacturer Innophys’ Muscle Suit Every, we had one of our very own to test out. The apparatus officially went on sale November 1, and our staff writer Ahiru Neko won the instant office shouting and begging contest to earn the honor to be the first to try it on.

▼ Before…

▼ After!

You put Muscle Suit Every on via a set of shoulder loops and straps that connect at the chest and waist. It’s not much more difficult than putting on a backpack, so you won’t need a team of scrambling mecha technicians to assist you every time you want to suit up.

It’s also surprisingly light, by virtue of not having any motors or batteries. How then, you might be asking, does the muscle suit help support your muscular activities? Through the power of air pressure.

Near your waist, you’ll find a circular air pump, which maxes out at about 30 or 40 pumps. The pump fills the suit with air, raising the internal pressure of the sections on your back which in turn provides stabilizing strength to keep your core and thighs from quivering dangerously when lifting heavy objects.

▼ Muscle Suit Every in action

To test the suit’s effectiveness, Ahiru Neko transported two bags of rice, weighing a combined 10 kilograms (22 pounds) back and forth across a section of a local park, putting the bags down and picking them up at each end of his 10 round trips.

He then repeated the process, but this time without the suit.

Sure enough, it was a lot easier with the help of Muscle Suit Every than when he relied purely on his own human strength. While he was able to keep his core perfectly still when wearing the suit, his muscles began jiggling almost immediately without it, and when he was done with his suitless run he could feel his lower back was heavily fatigued.

However, there is one thing to bear in mind, which is that while Muscle Suit Every provided Ahiru Neko with extra support, it didn’t boost his brute strength. As you can see, the arms remain unassisted, and the whole point of the suit is to support the muscles you already have, not to do the work for you. As such, it won’t give you the power to clean and jerk refrigerators, punch holes in walls, or any of the other intimidating feats of strength Ahiru Neko had sort of been looking forward to terrorizing his officemates with.

Nonetheless, it’s a pretty cool gadget, and with specs boasting up to 25.5 kilogram-force, is sounds like a pretty useful one too. Muscle Suit Every can be ordered here through Amazon for 149,600 yen (US$1,385), and between this and Tokyo getting the 2020 Olympics, just like anime/manga Akira told us we would back in the ‘80s, the future seems a little closer.

Images ©SoraNews24
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