As the digital lifestyle continues to take more and more time out of a person’s day, health conscious individuals are looking for alternative ways of staying fit. Everything from Paleo diets to aerial dancing have crawled out of the woodwork to feed the growing market for quick fitness. But, even in a sea of oddities, one of the strangest fitness exercises has to be Whole Body Vibration.
It’s not that difficult to understand what whole body vibration wants to happen; by using a body vibration machine, people will literally shake their bodies into shape, plus some other benefits. There are hundreds of retailer websites and articles allegedly supporting the science behind the benefits of whole body vibration; one of these include incorporating the correct vibration frequency.
The correct vibration frequency, according to whole body vibration proponents, depends on the kind of workout people want, and the current state of their bodies. Do they want to relieve muscle stress? Tone certain body parts? Or, strengthen specific muscle groups?
There’s a specific range of vibration frequencies that the machine should generate for the exercise that both maximizes muscle activation, and does so safely. Hitting the perfect frequency isn’t always easy, and it will always change with every session, because of the changes the body undergoes.
The most common range of vibration frequencies seems to be between twenty and forty hertz. This is the range where scientists seem to find the most positive effects during their training experiments. According to the studies conducted by veteran researcher Jorn Rittweger, vibrations under twenty hertz seem to stimulate muscle relaxation. On the other hand, anything above fifty hertz causes muscle soreness, and even hematoma in untrained subjects.
It’s very possible that the perfect frequency of a person lies outside this range, but that would infer that person’s body is different from most of their peers.