Vibration Plate Exercise Guide

Vibration plate exercise involves using a vibration plate to enhance muscle training, achieving more advanced results than traditional exercises.

The essence of vibration plate exercise lies in utilizing vibrations to induce rapidly repeated skeletal muscle contractions, which not only engage muscles, bones and and connective tissues more effectively but also create an efficient skeletal pump effect, improving blood circulation and lymph flow.

Exercise Poses

Many common muscle exercise poses that we regularly use for improving our strength and balance can work well on a linear vibration plate.

As the exercise platforms laying on the ground, vibration plates are better suited for lower body muscle training than for upper body exercises.

Below are the exercise poses that we recommend to perform on our linear vibration plates.

Lower Body Exercises

[ Squat ]
Target muscles around knee joints

[ Deadlift ]
Target lower back muscles

[ Calf-Raise & Tiptoe ]
Target lower leg and foot muscles

[ Hip Flexor Stretch ]
Increase core flexibility

[ Hamstring Stretch ]
Inrease core flexibility

Mechanisms of Vibration Plate Exercises

Vibration-assisted 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. For some training poses, vibration-assisted 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 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. The muscle contractions also create a skeletal muscle pump effect that promote the peripheral circulation of blood, lymph and interstitial fluids.

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.

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.

Warning

Some vibration plate models are designed to have side-to-side lateral movement. Such a movement does not induce muscle contraction, and on the other hand, is harmful to knee joints.

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 PlatePivotal 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.

The above recommended exercise poses are mainly for linear vibration, but some of these poses are also suitable to use on a pivotal oscillation plate.

Caution

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.

Always keep your knee bent to avoid vibration from directly impacting your knee cartilage discs.

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.