Generally speaking, if a weight loss method sounds just too good to be true, it’s probably a scam or an insufficiently researched solution. Yet, we continue to see headlines that promise to reveal the ultimate weight loss method, that one solution will help us lose weight for good without having to starve ourselves or spend endless hours at the gym.
“Would you like to lose weight by doing nothing”? Sure, where do I sign up? But let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as a magic solution when it comes to weight loss. You can’t eat whatever you want and spend your days on the couch, waiting for the extra pounds to magically melt away.
Now that you know that I don’t believe in solutions that promise to help you get fit overnight, we can talk about whole body vibration and the principles and mechanisms behind this form of training. This article will answer the question in the title: Can body vibration machines help you get fit?

Does whole body vibration support weight loss?

The very short answer is yes, it does, but let’s see how! Whole body vibration means more than standing on a platform that moves up and down, lifting your body. This machine’s rhythmic movement and the oscillations place a load on the body, which works your muscles much like weight lifting exercises. This load is defined as acceleration or G-force, and can be twice, three times or several times more powerful than the Earth’s gravity, so when you stand or do dynamic exercises on a vibration plate, your body feels heavier even if you don’t lift weights.

The effects on your muscles and fat-burning systems are the same as during weight-bearing exercises: the muscle fibers contract and relax, but much faster, and burn calories to produce energy and to perform their functions during the workout. The advantage is that the vibrations are sent to your whole body and not to a single group of muscles, so you can target multiple areas at once and work your body in a thorough manner.

Thanks to the shape of the whole body vibration plate, you can perform a variety of exercises from squats and lunges to crunches and triceps dips, so you can train your entire body. As you can guess, the harder your muscles work, the more calories they burn and this is how WBV supports weight loss.

But there’s another interesting aspect proven by scientific papers: whole body vibration can block the accumulation of fats especially in the abdominal area and can help in reducing the body fat percentage and improving the lean mass and muscle tone. So you can rely on this method to lose weight, get fit and toned, but keep in mind that in order to see results, you have to actually do WBV exercises, not just sit on the platform at a low G-force and wait for miracles.