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Can Vibrations Help Lose Weight?
 

Though people are aware that they will put on weight if they adopt sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy diet, many have actually become overweight or even obese. Perhaps, the long working hours could have refrained them from exercising regularly and most people just could not resist tasty foods usually of high calorie and are very unhealthy too.

Once a person is over weight or obese, he or she will be advised by the doctors to lose weight since over weight or obesity can lead to many chronic diseases including heart disease, high cholesterol, stroke, Type-2 diabetes and even certain types of cancer.

There are all sorts of programs and gadgets claiming that they can help lose weight and each of them has its own unique features that can attract overweight people to use it. One of them is vibration plate machine, which might not be known to many people.

Vibration plate machine has a platform that vibrates when a person stands on it. The body is subjected to many small vibrations per second, which causes the small muscles in the whole body to contract more and the tendons and ligaments to stretch more. The reason behind this is that the body has to adjust constantly to the motion.

According to medical experts, this would help build up muscle mass, strength and flexibility. Muscle cells tend to burn more calories since they are responsible for all movements including subtle ones like blinking. Hence, the increased muscle mass will assist the body to burn more calories that leads to loss of fat.

From the point of view of physical training professionals, the vibration plate machine could increase exercise intensity in 2 ways. It helps the body to use more than 90 percent of its muscles and it also increases the gravitational force by 2 to 6 times when a person exercises on it. It is, therefore, harder for a person to exercise on the plate than on the ground. As more energy is required to perform the same exercise, more calories are burnt on the vibration plate.

Two studies, one in Belgium and the other in United States, have shown that more body fat was lost when whole body vibration training was added to a diet or exercise regimen than either program on its own or together.

Belgian researchers examined the effect of long-term whole body vibration training on visceral fat of 79 overweight patients (randomly divided into 4 groups) and their findings were published in 2010. Visceral fat is the fat surrounding the organs in the abdomen. Abdominal fat is made up of visceral fat and subcutaneous fat that lies between the skin and the abdominal wall.

Their results showed that patients assigned to the group that dieted and followed progressive vibrating plate machine training had the largest percentage drop in body weight and in visceral fat after 6 months. At the end of the year-long study, measurements showed that only participants who exercised on the vibrating plate machines maintained the amount of fat loss when they returned to their usual lifestyle.

The other study on 55 post-menopausal women conducted in United States showed similar results in a paper published in 2009. It compared effects of no exercise, resistance training only and resistance training with whole body vibration.

At the end of 8 months, women who did not exercise gained 1.8 percent of body fat and those who did only resistance training lost 1.6 percent. For those who did both types of exercise, 3 percent body fat was reduced.

Most doctors and medical experts believe that whole body vibration therapy alone would probably not lead to weight loss and it might not improve significantly a person’s cardiovascular fitness. More importantly, long-term vibration could harm the soft tissues and body organs. For instance, workers using vibrating tools like road drills can suffer from nerve damage to the hands, which is known as ‘vibration white finger’ disease. It is not known if long-term use of vibration plate machines would create similar problems.

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