GE's Ingenious Idea for Simplifying Every Gadget in Your Kitchen

Use your broom as a barbell. While your broom isn't as heavy as a barbell, it can help your form. Rest the broom across your shoulders and grasp the ends at a comfortable distance away from your shoulders while you do squats or walking lunges. The broom will help keep you from dropping your chest during these exercises, a common form mistake, and will also help stretch those notoriously tight pectoral muscles.Use kitchen towels for a good stretch. Towels are great aides to help with your post-workout stretching. Wrap a towel around your feet and pull backward lightly when stretching your hamstrings. Get a good chest stretch by sitting with your legs straight in front of you with good posture. Place a hand towel in both hands and raise your arms above your head, keeping your elbows by your ears.

Slowly and gently, move the towel from directly overhead backward so your elbows move slightly behind your ears, until you feel a stretch across the front of your chest.Use what you have before buying new, expensive equipment you don't actually need.Don't be afraid to get creative — if you can get a full workout using only objects from your kitchen, imagine what a gold mine you have in the rest of your house.We can all save a fair amount of energy by changing our lightbulbs, and making sure our appliances aren't sucking power when they're turned off. But what could we do if we fundamentally remade how our kitchen gadgets work? GE turned to Frog to figure it out. "We could have done anything from trying to design a better lightbulb to imagining a nuclear-powered consumer product," says Jonas Damon, creative director at Frog.

Ultimately, Frog bypassed the opportunity to design a countertop Chernobyl in favor a kitchen gadget called EcoSwitch that combines the functionality of a tea kettle, slow cooker, hot plate, and blender into a single, energy-efficient package.An all-in-one kitchen gadget might sound more like a tacky SkyMall tchotchke than an eco-innovation, but unlike other solutions that bodge together half a dozen different devices, EcoSwitch is all about streamlining. Damon's team noticed that blenders, hot pots, and coffee makers each had their own plastic housings and power supplies, but at their core they either heated a vessel or rotated it.