By: Kennedy Shelley
You may remember when your grandparents used to have machines that were supposed to vibrate away the fat.
My grandmother had an odd machine that was a vibrating belt. I wish my parents hadn’t given it away.
Using these machines was considered healthy back then.
And it’s making a comeback.
It’s called Whole Body Vibration (WBV) which involves standing on a machine vibrating at frequencies of 15-70 hertz.
Basically, it’s moving you all around and shaking up your insides. And it is helping things your grandmother didn’t know existed.
The researchers who are studying this new form of body oscillation are now calling it “light neuromuscular resistance training.”
This type of motion increases bone density, strength, balance and overall improved muscle performance. Not bad for standing on a machine that seems to do all the work.
But that’s not true, when you are standing on a moving platform, your body has to constantly compensate to stay upright. In other words, while this seems like passive work, you are actually doing a great deal by fighting to stay standing.
But remarkably, it has been shown that WBV helps improve blood sugar levels and reduce type 2 diabetics need for insulin.
And it also reduces inflammation in the body which is the leading cause of heart disease.
This seems crazy until researchers released their paper in the International Journal of Molecular Science.
They found that people who engage in WBV exercise had a huge increase in their gut macrobacteria. Just how much? They have 17 times more than average.
The gut microbiome means the mix of bacteria that lives in your intestines. The sheer number of types of bacteria that live in us is staggering.
There are over 500 known types of bacteria living in us, with over two million genes. When these are paired with viruses and fungi, they make up the microbiome.
There are literally trillions of bacteria in every one of us. All this stuff weighs about five pounds.
To learn more about the importance of this important part of your body see this article in Freedom Health News.
In this Molecular Science study, the researchers used rats and WBV for a month. The rat’s stools were examined and the found that they were getting rid of inflammatory waste at a rate 7 times higher than the control group.
The researchers hypothesize that this shaking seems to help the gut ferment and excrete the inflammatory bad bacteria.
Does WBV training cause weight loss or toning all by itself? Sadly not according to research.
In 2004 a group of scientists tried WBV on a group of untrained women. There were no changes in diet or exercise, and they did not find that it caused weight loss or any reduction in body fat.
But the new research is showing that using WBV compliments other aspects of training. So, using in conjunction with weights or aerobic exercise and low carb diet might increase the benefits.
Beyond the help to our gut bacteria, WBV has been shown to improve back pain and help improve balance.
But now that we are figuring out that shaking up our insides helps improve our gut health there is a new reason to look into this new old technology.
