Have you been looking for an easy way to tone your body? If so, you’ve probably heard all about vibration plates and what they can do for you in terms of toning body muscles, burning calories, strengthening muscles, and improving flexibility. In order to determine whether these power plates really work or are just fads, we’ll need to take a closer look at the science behind such exercising machines.
Now, before we go on about how a vibration plate can help you tone up, it should be noted that these machines will only produce results if you apply the right exercising techniques.
What Are Vibration Plates All About
Also known as power plates, vibration plates provide high-speed workouts by using vibrations to stimulate muscles into relaxing and contracting. Normally, our muscles contract once or twice a second. However, with vibration plates, this number can increase to 30 to 50 times per second depending on the intensity of the vibrations and the workout you’re engaged in. This increase in contractions is merely an indication of how hard the muscles are working.
Generally, the vibrations fire up muscle activity by forcing you to keep your balance while completing whatever workout routine you’re doing. This results in the plate’s remarkable ability to tone body muscles as well as burn more calories during workouts.
Vibration Plate Muscle Toning Tips
Now that you have an idea of how vibration plates work, let’s take a look at a few tips to help you tone up quicker.
Start Gradually
Whether you’re looking to burn calories, build strength, or tone your muscles, the best way to train on a vibration plate is to increase the frequency gradually. This helps to keep your muscles challenged during workouts and will therefore enhance results.
Seeing as increasing frequency gradually helps enhance the muscle toning benefit of vibration plates, the best vibration plate for toning muscles would be one with a wide frequency range. So, keep this in mind when you go shopping for your very own vibration plate.
Maintain a Proper Position
In order to develop muscle tone when using a vibration plate, it’s essential for you to adopt a position that puts tension on whatever muscles you’re targeting. For instance, the proper starting position for engaging in squats would be to stand in the center of the machine with both feet planted firmly on the machine. When done right, squats will help you tone lower body muscles such as the glutes, hamstrings, calves and quads. If you’re been trying to figure out how to get bigger hips, squats can help with this too!
On the other hand, you can also perform upper body resistance routines on the vibration plate such as push-ups or bicep curls by using the attached tension cords that come with most machines. Whatever muscle toning exercise you choose to perform on a vibration plate, make sure to maintain the correct posture in order to maximize benefits and minimize risk of injury.
Most vibration plates come with DVDs or exercise booklets/charts showing you how to do a variety of exercises. Therefore, knowing the ideal position for various workouts will not be difficult. However, if you’re not sure of the right position for any exercise, consulting a fitness trainer or researching on the Internet will provide you with answers.
Mix Up Your Exercises
Although engaging in one type of exercise during a vibration plate workout session can yield positive results, it doesn’t provide you with the best way to maximize your time. You should instead try mixing up your exercise routines by combing:
- Compound exercises that use more than one muscle group, and
- Isolation exercises that target specific muscles.
For instance, you can engage in squats for a few minutes and then follow up with bicep curls.
Mixing up your routines engages every muscle group in the body, thus putting you on the right path toward gaining total fitness. Engaging in different exercises also provides the added benefit of increasing the potential for calorie burn if you’re looking to lose some fat.
Vibration plates are a great time saver since they target several muscles at the same time. The best part is you don’t have to exercise on a vibration plate for hours on end in order to enjoy the benefits of these training tools. But that said, only a good quality vibration plate will be able to provide you with these benefits. So, make sure to go through as many vibration plate reviews as possible to ensure you end up with a high performance unit that’s perfect for your fitness needs.