Independence Isn’t Given. It’s Trained. But Are You Training the Right Way?

In the news, we keep hearing about glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) drugs and how they help you lose weight, but the weight might not be all you lose. Up to 40% can come from muscle too. Let's put that into perspective. As you reach 30 years of age, your metabolism slows down, making it harder to lose weight. This is partially due to the effects of maturation. By our mid-20s, we have stopped growing, so cellular turnover slows down and normalizes. But by 30, an inactive life can have the beginning of dire consequences: the loss of strength.

An average non-exercising individual will lose 5-7 pounds of muscle per decade after the age of 35. This can be replaced with 15 pounds of fat per decade. GLP-1 drugs can increase that muscle loss, and so can statin drugs, which interestingly block natural GLP-1 production, contributing to weight gain.

Your muscles are made up of several different fiber types. We generally categorize them into slow twitch and fast twitch. Slow twitch is considered endurance muscle, which does not bulk well and has lower contractile strength capabilities. Fast twitch is considered power or sprint fiber. It bulks well overall and produces the force required to lift heavy objects or move quickly. Now that we have the definition out of the way, are you ready for the next part? It is the fast-twitch muscle that we lose as we age, something called sarcopenia.

Now, whether you are an Olympic athlete or not, you still need that fast-twitch muscle fiber. These fibers help you change direction quickly. They are reactive, and they are also where the majority of your muscle tone and strength reside. We call it physical capacity.

The capacity to perform work.

Think of it like being able to lift a 40-pound bag of water softener, or not. Or having the speed and agility to move yourself from a seated position to standing. Also know that it is the fast-twitch muscle that sarcopenia claims the most of.

That's right. The fast-twitch muscles are the ones you lose over the years. The only way to save them is to strength train. Cardiovascular exercise cannot save them. They respond to resistance, and that resistance must be at least 70% of your maximum. And that's where most people fail. They don't know how to strength train, and if they do it, they only use a few body parts.

Where whole-body vibration enters the picture

Enter whole-body vibration training. It's not a new concept. We have known about vibration training since the late 1800s through John Kellogg. He abandoned the research he was doing, but not before the Soviets had picked it up and perfected the concept. Kellogg used a chair, a hard wooden one, which was not the most comfortable thing to sit on. The Soviets used a platform, and they used it to increase bone mineral density for their cosmonauts. They noticed some peculiar side effects, however. The cosmonauts also got stronger. So they used the same technology to train their Olympic hopefuls, with devastating results for other countries. They literally won more gold medals in the following 25 years than all other countries combined. The Soviets had discovered how to stimulate that fast-twitch muscle through appropriate vibration technology.

When the Berlin Wall fell, a Dutch speed skater picked up that technology and created the first commercial machine in Finland. That technology reached the U.S. in the late 1990s, and we have been benefiting from it since.

Just like the Soviets, the Dutch understood that stimulating fast-twitch muscle helped athletes win medals. But what we have discovered along the way has become far more valuable. The frail benefit tremendously by having a machine that can stimulate their muscles with very little movement. That allows people who have pain or poor range of motion to use something to get strong without hurting themselves in the process. People with osteoporosis can use it to increase bone mineral density, and athletes can use it to win medals. It's an all-around perfect training mechanism for all types of people.

But the important point here is that whole-body vibration makes it possible to live life, to reclaim youthful activities, to compete, or just to lift your own grandchildren. It provides the ability to turn around your health. It creates enthusiasm as you reclaim activity, and that creates the momentum to do more.

What reclaiming strength gives back

Imagine what reclaiming your strength could do for you. You could climb a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. You could go out and play golf or pickleball again. You could slow down the aging process and reduce your chance of falls by 67%. Statistically, you could live longer too. Increased strength reduces all-cause mortality by about 30%. Staying strong and building muscle protects you from the gradual loss of muscle and strength that occurs with age. It boosts metabolism, making it easier to both maintain and lose weight, increases bone mass, and lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. It also helps normalize blood sugars and protects you from diabetes.

It also helps maintain brain size and cognition. Ultimately, remaining strong helps you navigate life more easily, not just physically, but psychologically too.

But what's the best way to do all of this?

How Power Plate changes the exercise signal

At ReVibe, we utilize a technology from a company called Power Plate. It uses gentle vibration while you are exercising to stimulate all of your muscles, not just the ones that are lifting. This is the first real advantage of this technology.

Power Plate whole-body vibration also stimulates the fast-twitch muscles, the ones that if you don't use, you lose. Remember, your fast-twitch muscle controls your reaction time, your speed, your agility, and your overall strength. Calling them fast twitch is a bit of a misnomer, actually, because it describes how muscles react under load. Slow-twitch muscle does not get stimulated when you lift slowly, for instance. It is stimulated by endurance events that are low load. Fast-twitch muscle is generally used for sprinting, lifting heavier objects, or when you need to move quickly, like catching yourself from falling.

Like catching yourself from falling!

Did I emphasize that enough? Without your fast-twitch fibers, you cannot react quickly enough or with enough strength to stop yourself from falling. You would also struggle climbing a flight of stairs, getting up from a seated position, or lifting any weight, like a grandchild, for instance.

It is important to understand that muscle is controlled by the central nervous system: your brain and spinal cord. They rely on high-threshold motor units embedded in muscle for reactive feedback. These fiber signals lessen with age and muscle loss. Along with that, all the tiny mechanisms that make energy to maintain your body in health also lessen. They are called mitochondria, and they make the energy that allows muscle to contract. They make the energy that allows you to feel healthy. And they are lost as you age without strength training.

So, aging does not just reduce muscle mass, or sarcopenia. It also reduces the signals between the brain and the muscle. Remember, as you age, you lose mostly fast-twitch muscle. That means you not only lose your strength and ability to do things, but you also lose your reaction times and your energy levels. Thus, the older you get, the greater your risk of falling.

The modern life problem

Our modern world lacks the ability to keep us strong. We sit at work. We come home and sit in front of a TV all night. Then we go to bed. It's as if modern life were engineered to starve your body of the stimulus it needs to stay healthy.

It shows up in the aging body first as a loss of strength and then balance. It forces most people to look down when they walk instead of forward. This slightly shifts the center of gravity forward, causing you to instinctively bend your knees and shuffle to prevent falling forward. This simple reactive act, over time, forces you to use the thigh muscles more, using the glutes and hamstrings less. Since strength is lost systemically, you will curl your shoulders and lean more. You have effectively adopted the old man's gait pattern.

Did you catch all that? Regardless of what social media seems to think you should be able to do, gait speed still remains one of the strongest predictors of longevity, and, of course, it's directly tied to fast-twitch muscle.

Other things happen as you age too. Collagen production slows. Tendons and connective tissue begin to lose their elasticity. This reduces force potential and increases the risk of tearing tendons, and you get weaker, increasing the risk of muscle injury.

Why traditional exercise often misses the point

Some people have been exercising at a regular health club using equipment that isolates movement and maintains that movement in a set range of motion. Studies show that this results in less force and strength production. That's because your body moves in all planes of motion, not just one. To be fully protected, your body needs multi-directional force production, not set-range-of-motion or muscle isolation. In life, your body does not isolate motion. It uses multi-directional force in all planes. Failing to exercise like that simply increases muscular imbalance and pain.

So, moving more is not the answer. Clearly, cardiovascular-type exercises fail to create a threshold stimulus to activate fast-twitch muscle. But we are not moving more. Clearly, we are moving less. Even our children choose to play inactive video games over playing outside in ways that promote movement. Our food supply is compromised with high-carb, high-sugar choices that drive weight gain, and supplements cannot override bad food choices. So, we remain inactive, use the pharmaceutical industry to keep going, and eventually, once we lose all the strength we need to keep going, we succumb to our lifestyle.

We need to move away from this as soon as possible. But walking more isn't the answer. Traditional set-range-of-motion strength-training machines are not the answer. So what is it?

Functional fitness is the answer

In a word, it's functional fitness. The difference is interesting because most health clubs have set-range-of-motion equipment. Not because it's better, but because they can push you through their one-set system quickly, making more room for others. Now, there's nothing wrong with one set. I'm actually an advocate of one-set workouts. Scientifically, it makes sense. But I am not a fan of fixed-range equipment, primarily because the body does not move that way. The human body operates in multiple planes, not one. The human body bends, twists, rotates, flexes, and extends in everyday life. It is my firm belief that any strength exercise performed at the gym must be transferred to real life. When was the last time you did a fixed-range-of-motion, isolated-muscle leg extension in real life?

Functional training can take on any type of exercise that allows the body to migrate through multiple planes of motion at a time. Cable machines can provide functional training resistance. Free weights can too. But the best of all worlds comes from whole-body vibration training.

Perhaps you have never heard of it before. Perhaps you didn't realize that Olympians train on it, or professional athletes, even celebrities. But they, like most of us in the industry who practice physiology, understand that the plates vibrate 35-50 times per second, forcing muscle to react to multi-dimensional changes in balance. Those changes stimulate both guiding and stabilizing muscles, and they do it better than any regular health club can do: thirty percent better. This is not a passive exercise machine that generates muscle contraction for you like many research papers have suggested. These machines utilize your own exercise movements to enhance your outcomes. One set, in fact, is equal to at least three sets of regular exercise at the typical gym.

Yes, you read that right. Whole-body vibration training is not traditional exercise. It is neuromuscular innervation, which strengthens muscles, builds stronger bones, improves balance, improves blood flow, and strengthens the connection of your brain to your body. Plus, it has all the traditional benefits of exercise too. It lowers blood pressure, improves good cholesterol, builds and protects mitochondria, reduces risk of falls and disease, gives you more energy, and helps you generate natural GLP-1 hormones that help you lose weight.

Did I mention that it preserves fast-twitch muscle too? Yep, and without the heavy weights that you would need to lift in a regular gym. Because you neurologically stimulate the body to shift back and forth, you also stimulate balance. But most important, you stimulate all muscle, even the small ones in the spine that contribute to balance and also just happen to be the ones that get pulled when you hurt your back.

Many studies show that exercise increases blood flow to the brain and stops the brain from shrinking as we grow older. But that increase in blood flow also increases the flow of nutrients to all of your cells while removing waste more efficiently. But there's more. The vibration also raises nitric oxide, which lowers your chances of a heart attack or a stroke.

How do you want to live your life?

If we look at the whole picture here, it means we age slower and hold on to our independence longer. And if that means you can spend longer doing the things you love, then why shouldn't you exercise smarter and get all the benefits too?

Whole-body vibration has been around a long time. Olympic athletes and celebrities use it to stay young and keep in shape. You should too. Keeping those fast-twitch fibers means your metabolism stays higher and your energy levels do too.

Whole-body vibration also maintains and increases the number of mitochondria you have in your body. That not only means less disease and more energy, but it also means a longer life with fewer complications.

How do you want to live your life?