Whole Body Vibration Training as an Adjunct to Classic Resistance Training is Particularly Effective in the Early Phase of Training - New Exercise Stimulus, News Gains!

If strong is the new skinny, adding vibration training to your regimen may help you to get "skinny" ;-)

You will probably remember the post about hydraulic resistance training and my plea to stay open minded with respect to new training techniques. Now, I have to admit that I have not always followed my own advice in the past. Whole body vibration training is, as I told you only recently, something I have never taken seriously... in my own defense, I do have to say that there is still no evidence that it will ever fully replace classic resistance and/or cardiovascular training, though. Due to its ability to reach muscle groups regular resistance training exercises won't stimulate optimally, the idea of using whole body vibration as an adjunct to classic resistance training as it was pursued by Margarett T. Jones, recently (Jones. 2014) sounds legit.

The purpose of Jones' study was to examine the effects of progressive-overload, whole-body vibration (WBV) training on strength and power as part of a 15-week periodized, strength training (ST) program.
To this end, Jones recruited eighteen collegiate women athletes with at least one year of strength training experience who had not spent a single minute on one of the fancy vibration platforms you will find in more and more gyms these days and assigned them randomly to one of the following groups:

• WBV + ST combined - combined whole body vibration + strength training
• SHAM + ST combined - same as above but without active WBV training

During the WBV sham + ST protocol, athletes completed the same volume, tempo, and duration of exercises selected for the WBV + ST protocol without the inclusion of WBV, which is described by Jones as follows:

"Twice weekly, separated by 48 hours, WBV was administered during team lifting sessions via a vibration platform (Pro5 AIRdaptive; Power Plate, Irvine, CA, USA) that produced vertical sinusoidal vibrations with a frequency range of 25–50 Hz and a vertical displacement range of 2–6 mm (i.e., amplitude). After completion of the Bod Pod testing session, each athlete was introduced to the 6 exercises of WBV1 (Table 1) by performing each exercise for 30 seconds (i.e., 30 Hz, low amplitude).

Table 1: Whole-body vibration off-season training program; D = dynamic exercise; SH = static hold exercise; midtesting and 5 days of active rest occurred between WBV1 and WBV2 (Jones. 2014)

For WBV training, subjects performed 2 separate 3-week training phases (WBV1, WBV2) that consisted of dynamic and static hold exercises for the upper and lower body for a total of 12 WBV training sessions (Table 1). Exposure time was limited to 6 minutes for any given workout, as has been recommended for the improvement in muscle power. All WBV sets were 30 seconds in duration followed by a 60-second rest (1:2 work-to-relief ratio). Whole-body vibration protocol exercises did not use an external load, only body weight. Frequency and amplitude progressed in intensity from the first 3-week training phase to the second 3-week training phase." (Jones. 2014)

As you may already have gathered based on the study duration, we are dealing with a cross over study, where after 2x3 weeks in the one arm, the women were crossed over to the other arm of the study. In that, exercises, frequency, and amplitude progressed in intensity from the first 3-week WBV training to the second 3-week phase (see Table 1-2).

Table 2: Off-season 15-week strength training program;LB = lower body; UP = upper body; w:r = work:rest ratio (Jones. 2014)

Unlike you may have expected the ST workouts (see Table 2) were not the usual sissy stuff you often seen in scientific studies. With O-lifting, core work, squatting and some pushing and pulling, they workouts may in fact look much like a wild mix of what some of you are probably doing at the gym.
References:

• Jones, M. "Progressive-Overload Whole-Body Vibration Training as Part pf Periodized,Off-Season Strength Training in Trained Women Athletes." Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 28.9 (2014):2461–2469