Mechanisms of Vibration Plate Exercises

Physical and Physiological Effects

Vibration plate exercise utilizes vibration stimulation to induce rapidly repeated skeletal muscle contractions, which enhance the effectiveness and can achieve advanced results that is not available from traditional physical exercises. Vibration plate exercises are revolutionary.

Vibration induces skeletal muscle contraction due to our skeletal muscle's instinct stretch reflex.

Skeletal Muscle's Stretch Reflex

As a mechanism of maintaining autonomous stability and balance of our body, our skeletal muscle fibers (cells) naturally tend to keep a constant length. When the skeletal muscles are stretched, they spontaneously contract to resist the stretch. This is skeletal muscle's stretch reflex response.

The fast reciprocating movement of vibration can be used to stretch and relax skeletal muscles, and produce rapidly repeated skeletal muscle contraction.

This rapidly repeated muscle contraction effectively activates the muscles, bone and the connective tissues (tendons, ligaments), effectively exercising our musculoskeletal system and neuromuscular system, enhancing their functionality.

In order to produce muscle contraction, the direction (or a vector component of the direction) of vibration needs to be aligned with the length direction of the muscle fiber, to induce the muscle's stretch reflex response.

Therefore, when posing your body on a vibration plate, you would try to align your target skeletal muscles with the vibration direction. Muscle direction usually aligns the bone direction, mostly vertical.

Skeletal Muscle Pump Effect

The muscle contractions also create a skeletal muscle pump effect that promote the peripheral circulation of blood, lymph and interstitial fluids.

the rhythmic contraction and relaxation of skeletal muscles that help propel blood and lymphatic fluid through the body. This natural process is essential for maintaining adequate circulation, preventing blood pooling, and reducing tissue swelling.

The skeletal muscle pump effect makes physical exercise more effective by enhancing the nutrient and oxygen supply and discharge of metabolic wastes

Dynamics, Efficiency & Effectiveness

Exercise poses designed for strength and balance training are usually slow-motion or isometric. Such a nature is changed when vibration is incorporated in the exercise. Vibration stimulation adds dynamics, efficiency and effectiveness to the physical exercise.

Linear Vibration vs Pivotal Oscillation

Below are exaggerated slow motion animations of the two types of vibration pattern. They interact with your body differently.

Linear Vibration Plate	Pivotal Oscillation Plate
High Frequency Low Amplitude	Low Frequency High Amplitude

The exercise poses used on linear vibration plate and on pivotal oscillation plate should be designed to utilize each of their movement patters to effectively generate muscle contractions.

Proper Use of Vibration

Vibration exercise pose needs to be designed to keep vibration from directly impacting your bones and cartilages.

Instead, the vibration exercise should be designed to only stretch your skeletal muscles, and let the muscle contraction to press the bones and cartilages.

Adding vibration to physical exercise makes the exercise more effective due to the fast pace repetitive muscle contraction and the impact of extra G-force.

On the other hand, the repetitive movement and the extra G-force can also amplify the negative results if your exercise pose or the vibration movement is wrongly designed.

Although all kinds of body movements are the results of skeletal muscle contraction, some movements are not well supported by the design of our musculoskeletal structure. Habitual use of these not-well-supported movement can cause injury. Remember what happened in Dolphin Tale?

[Example] Lateral and twist movements on knee joint are not well supported by the muscle groups connected to the knee joint. Without muscle support, the movement can injure the ligaments and wear the cartilages. Lateral and twist movements on knee joint should be avoided by adjusting the pose, in a way that the movement is supported by the connected skeletal muscles.