Vibration Therapy

The rapidly oscillating Galileo plate stimulates the whole body by tilting slightly around an axis. A person stands on the tilting plate and senses a vibration coming up from the plate. These vibrations are too fast for a person to voluntarily react to; however they stimulate the muscle, bone and tendons, which receive the vibration.

The vibration around an axis means while one leg is going up the other is going down, simulating walking and allowing damping of the vibration as the forces are transmitted up the body towards the head. It is proposed the muscles are stimulated by the ‘tonic vibration reflex’.

More effective and more efficient exercise

The effect on the muscular system — especially when joints are flexed, such as in a half squat — is to fire the stretch reflex through the muscle spindles to add muscular force. In addition, the golgi tendon organs are activated by relatively strong contractions, lessening the force on the muscle as a protective mechanism. Theoretically, the muscles are fired, relaxed somewhat and fired again in this scenario, in response to the vibrations.

Normally a conscious muscle contraction only sees 40% of a muscle’s fibres contracting; when the contraction is stimulated via the stretch reflex 97% of the muscle fibres are contracting – immediately this a 250% increase in effectiveness. And because of the rapid turn around time of the stretch reflex (40 milliseconds) up to 25 contractions per second can occur in a muscle - equivalent to 1,500 contractions per minute.

No other form of exercise training is as effective and efficient as whole body vibration.