TikTok Myth of the Week: Vibratory Plates

Until this week, I only knew about the connection between vibration and fitness from old cartoons. Watch them long enough and soon you will see someone shaking their butt or stomach with a vibrating machine attached to a cloth belt. ( You know those .) They had to somehow get rid of fat – what a ridiculous idea! Except now TikTok has taken possession of it and is redistributing it again.

You can now buy cheap vibe or vibe plates on Amazon and that’s what most TikTokers seem to be using, though some shoot their clips on commercial machines like this one , which you can ask your gym to buy for a low price. 7996 dollars. In clip after clip, a person – almost always a young woman – stands on a plate, her hips vibrating madly as she tells you about how it burns fat and promotes lymphatic drainage, and she’s on her 15th day and can’t be sure. but she thinks it might work.

Here are a few vibration plates you can buy on Amazon if you want to try your hand at jigging TikTok (but please don’t):

• Music plays in this , and for some reason there are magnets for acupuncture under your feet.
• This one is fancier, with treadmill-like handles and control panel, and seems to have a cup holder at knee level (?!).
• It’s one of the cheapest I’ve found and hey it’s red.

What people think vibrating plates do

According to TikTok, vibrating plates can change your life in just 10-15 minutes a day. The claims are just about everything you can imagine: they cleanse you, burn fat, tone your muscles, and more. If it’s a positive or can be rotated like a positive, someone says vibrating plates can do it.

Device descriptions on Amazon are the bag to go. One example: “Fitness platform with lymphatic drainage machine for weight loss, toning, health training in home gyms.” Some listings of these machines claim that using them for 10 minutes burns 400 calories, which is the equivalent of an hour of running or 30 minutes of yoga. (What they mean by “equal” is never explained.)

TikTokers usually stand on plates and tell you it’s “how I lost 20 pounds in a month without going to the gym” or tell you to use them “when you want runner’s legs but refuse to run unless you’re in danger. ”

What Vibrating Plates Actually Do

It’s strange to see vibration advertised as being beneficial to health because the negative effects of vibration are known – for example, bus drivers who are exposed to full-body vibration through bus seats can end up with back pain or, according to the CDC , potentially even “cardio- vascular, gastrointestinal, nervous and urological disorders. The occasional use of ten minutes probably won’t cause such problems, but some TikTokers use machines for an hour or more.

There is some evidence that vibration can help improve bone density in postmenopausal women, although the authors of this review say the evidence is only strong for machines that produce more than 30 vibrations per second, and most Amazon machines don’t vibrate that fast. . This isn’t one of the most common TikTokers claims, but it’s a benefit that might be worth considering.

Strength studies typically compare exercise on a vibration plate with the same exercise without vibration. Not surprisingly, there is usually no difference between them; it is exercises that make you stronger, not vibrations. Claims that vibrating plates “make your muscles contract thirty to fifty times a second,” as one video puts it, seem to be unsupported by evidence.

What about weight loss? This 2019 review shows that many studies found no difference between participants who used and did not use a vibration plate, but some studies found little difference in weight loss. This sounds promising, but people often exercised on a plate (rather than just standing on it), and the difference in weight loss between the two groups was often too small to make any difference, even if it was considered a detectable difference.

In the end, there seems to be no basis for claims that standing on a plate for 15 minutes burns calories or burns fat, let alone “detoxifies”. So get on your rocking platform if you like, but don’t expect it to help you.