Our metabolic systems are fast learners. Sometimes, they catch up to what we’re doing so quickly, we start to see plateaus in our workout goals.
Your metabolism doesn’t want you to lose weight – it wants to conserve your energy and live the lifestyle it’s become accustomed to. So we have to work around the metabolism, and that means we have to get sneaky.
We have to bio-hack.
It would be a mistake to believe that bio-hacking can be traced back as far as clever tech start-ups in Silicon Valley and guru-types doing drugs at high altitudes.
Those guys can bio-hack – that’s for sure.
But people have been tampering with their biology for millennia! Some therapies, like vibration, we incorrectly code as recent innovations.
Vibration therapy has been around since the mid 19th century, as a matter of fact.
Gustav Zander, a Russian inventor and healer, developed a complex system involving weights and pulleys for the purposes of therapeutic vibrational sensation in 1867.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (the guy who invented cornflakes) began using vibration therapy in his medical practice around the 1890s.
It took space travel in the mid 20th century to embed vibration therapy in the canon of research conducted by NASA-funded scientists. You see, astronauts were experiencing loss of bone density due to prolonged time in zero-gravity spaces…
And vibration therapy had enough potential to restore that density that it warranted large-scale studies.
How Does That Work?
Vibration therapy is pretty much what it sounds like – your body sustains contact with a vibrating machine, either whole-body or localized, and the muscles in the body react by contracting and relaxing rapidly.
That’s why it’s often used to push body-sculptors past a plateau – the contracting and relaxing are like mini-workouts.
Now, it can be more complicated than that. Let’s define a few terms first.
Whole-body vibration therapy: when you stand, sit, or lay upon a vibrating platform, otherwise position yourself so that your whole body feels the effects of the vibrating machine.
Localized vibration therapy: when a small vibrating machine is applied to a particular area of the body for localized relief or exercise.
Vertical vibration: the platform moves up and down quickly, so that vibrations are traveling straight through the body and circulating lymphatic fluids.
There are several other types of vibration – including horizontal, elliptical, and oscillating – but for our purposes, let’s focus on vertical.
We can identify at least three distinct benefits to nano vibration technology…
Burn Fat Faster
People often turn to vibration therapy when conventional weight loss methods become frustrating.
Vibration training has been seen to mimic the effects of rigorous workout, because of the rapid muscle contraction.
In fact, daily usage of vibration therapy saw smaller fat cells, weight loss, and decreased insulin resistance in the mice studied. Plenty of fitness enthusiasts swear by the results of vibration therapy used in tandem with a healthy diet and regular movement as well.
Create Osteoblasts
Vibration therapy is often used in osteoperosis patients or – as with the astronauts – in cases of low bone-density, frequent breakage or fracturing, or slower healing.
Inside of bone marrow exist stem cells that can be turned into osteoblasts, or bone-building cells. (Really, they can be turned into whatever kind of cells the body needs – they only await the signal!)
Studies have shown that low-intensity vibration sends that signal to those cells and helps fill out the army of osteoblasts necessary to create stronger, denser, more stable bones.
Activate More Muscles
The more muscle fibers you activate, the more overall engagement you have from your muscles.
A standard workout may recruit 55% of your muscle fibers…
But a workout charged with vibration therapy can activate up to 95% of your muscle fibers.
This is because the body works extra hard to stabilize itself against the vibrations. The more motor units you engage, which your body will naturally do if it meets greater resistance than it’s used to, the more fibers it will activate in order to rise to the challenge.
Overtime, this makes you stronger!
My friends at Power Plate have been saying all of this for ages. Personally, I keep one of their vibration therapy machines at home to supplement my workouts.
I got to have Dr. Perry Commisa on my podcast last week to talk about the science behind their technology…