Vibration plate benefits: lymphatic drainage, skin tightening, cellulite prevention and more

Vibration plate training, skin tightening and cellulite reduction

• Power plate for cellulite: does vibration help break up cellulite?

• Vibration plate for lymphatic drainage, collagen production and fat accumulation reduction

• Limitations of vibration training

• Vibration plate weight loss? You can’t burn fat / lose weight just by standing on the power plate

• Lying or sitting on the vibration plate and turning your kidneys into a milkshake

• Best vibrationb plate exercises: all three of them

• How do you justify, then, one hour-long power plate classes?

• How about localised cellulite treatment based on vibration?

• Bones, tendons and ligaments: where vibration plate training really shines

• Maximising the results of your power plate training

• How to use vibration training for cellulite reduction, safely and effectively

• Vibration plate before and after pics: don’t pay much attention to them, 95%+ are fake

• So does vibration plate work?

• Have a skin tightening / cellulite treatment in London with the experts

Power plate for cellulite: does vibration help break up cellulite?

Cellulite is a combination of superficial fat accumulation, loose skin, water retention, inflammation and fibrosis.

Although vibration plate training does not really “cure” cellulite on it's own, it does indeed help improve some aspects of cellulite and it does boost skin tightening.

Its effect can be maximised if combined with healthy eating, cardiovascular exercise, a strong cellulite treatment and a concentrated cellulite cream.

(This article is part of five that examine the relation between exercise and cellulite. The other four deal with “cellulite exercises”, spot cellulite reduction, interval training and fartlek training.)

Vibration plate for lymphatic drainage, collagen production and fat accumulation reduction

Strong mechanical stimulation such as vibration produced by a vibrating platform does encourage adipocyte apoptosis and fibroblast proliferation and upregulation.

In plain English this means that fat cells are encouraged to die off early, whilst at the same time collagen cells are encouraged to replace the dead fat cells and also to increase their production of collagen and elastin (the two proteins that make your skin firm and elastic).

Those two things (fat cell apoptosis and fibroblast stimulation) can have a direct effect on three aspects of cellulite :

• fat (obviously)

• skin firmness (more collagen and elastin = more firmness and elasticity)

• water retention

Water retention, specifically, improves because blood vessel walls are made of collagen, elastin and similar proteins. So an improvement in collagen / elastin production would make them stronger and more resilient, thereby decreasing tissue water leakage and therefore water retention.

Furthermore, the vibration itself directly boosts circulation/lymphatic drainage while you exercise on the powerplate, by stimulating the blood and lymph vessels to contract).

Of course all the above can only be considered as good news for cellulite sufferers: if we believe the hype, all one needs to do to get rid of her cellulite is spend hours on a vibrating platform, right?

Well, as always in life, things are not that simple, as we explain in the following paragraph...

Limitations of vibration training

Vibration training and other mechanical stimulation does indeed cause the effects mentioned above. However, standing on a vibration platform for more than twenty minutes every other day is not the best thing for other tissues in your body, such as the cartilage found in your knee and hip joints or the retina in the back of your eyes and several other organs, which may be damaged by excessive vibration.

Some people are more sensitive, whilst some others are not - but in some cases you will never know before it's too late. This makes it pretty impossible to safely provide enough stimulation to your cellulite tissues to significantly affect cellulite.

Therefore, with twenty minutes you may notice some results with cellulite reduction, but nothing sensational will ever happen.

Vibration plate weight loss? You can’t burn fat / lose weight just by standing on the power plate

In addition, power plate training by its own is not enough.

Vibration does not burn fat (the most important component of cellulite), it merely disrupts the fat tissue. Any fatty acids released from the cellulite fat tissue will still have to be oxidised (i.e. burned) in your body, otherwise they will simply be re-deposited in fat tissue, including cellulite fat tissue.

So if you believe the countless hyped up articles on the web and expect to lose weight just by standing - or even by doing some light exercise - on a vibration platform, then no, power plate will NOT work.

Actually, you are not going to lose any more weight than if you did the same exercises off the vibration plate. To lose actual weight, and to really reduce cellulite, you must do some cardiovascular or resistance exercise before or after your vibration plate training, in order to burn some fat. Or be on a low calorie diet on power plate training days.

Lying or sitting on the vibration plate and turning your kidneys into a milkshake

"Well, if I can't stand all day on the vibration machine because it's bad for me, how about sitting or lying on it for less time, so that the machine affects more my cellulite and less my other organs and tissues?", we can hear you saying.

Well, this sounds like a logical argument and we have indeed seen many women lying down or sitting down on the power plate in gyms, enjoying the good vibrations and smiling with pleasure…

However, what these women do not realise is that their ovaries, liver, kidneys, adrenals, pancreas and other internal organs are not very particularly fond of vibration.

Limited vibration training may be good for connective tissue: bones, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, skin, blood vessels, muscles.

But vibration is detrimental to more fragile tissues, as the ones mentioned above. Quite simply, lying or sitting on the vibration platform will damage your internal organs long before it inflicts any significant damage to your belly fat tissue.

Personally, we would prefer to keep our kidneys intact and lose our love handles with other methods, rather than cause damage to our body. This is not scaremongering, it is reality: kidneys for example suffer quite negatively from the effects of vibration, and this has been documented for decades, long before vibration plates became popular.

All in all, we would never perform any other exercise on a power plate other than squats, calf raises and lunges - nothing else.

Best power plate exercises: all three of them

Yep, there are only three power plate exercises to do: squats, calf raises and lunges. Twenty minutes every other day and that's it.

Now if you are a personal trainer, with enough imagination you can create dozens of variations: two-leg squats, one-leg squats, deep squats, half-squats, "sissy squats", light jumping squats; bent-knee calf raises, straight-knee calf raises, with one leg or two legs; and then again normal lunges, side lunges, low lunges etc etc.

But the reality is, you can only perform three exercises on the power plate, SAFELY, effectively and without wasting your time with pointless routines: lunges, calf raises and squats.

Tightening your gluteus maximus, i.e. your main butt muscle, is the single best thing you can do for your butt, as the gluteus maximus lifts, firms and improves the shape of your butt more than anything else in the world.

So by doing lunges and squats on the power plate (plus calf raises for calf circulation) you combine internal muscle tightening with external skin tightening.

What could be better?

Doing sit ups, crunches, push ups and other torso/upper body exercises on a vibration plate are simply:

1. A waste of time, because not much vibration is transmitted to the right places, as in the case of performing arm curls whilst holding the belts connected to the machine. Or even as in the case of doing sit ups whilst your sitting bones are in contact with the vibration plate.

2. And dangerous, because too much vibration is transmitted to all the wrong places. For example your discs and cartilage found on your wrist joints do not particularly like being vibrated whilst you perform push ups. Neither your ovaries and lumbar discs are happy when you sit or perform ab crunches with you lumbar spine in contact with the vibration plate.

How do you justify, then, one hour-long power plate classes?

"If that is the case, why do personal trainers teach you such a large variety of exercises on vibration machines and why do gyms offer one-hour vibration plate classes?", we can hear you asking.

The answer to those questions can be simply summarised in just a few words: fashion, ignorance, responding to demand, boosting sales, copying what everyone else is doing...

How about localised cellulite treatment based on vibration?

Well, this is the next logical step in our quest to apply the benefits of vibration in the pursuit of cellulite reduction.

Several years ago we went down that route, in our quest to offer our clients the best cellulite treatment possible: we used the strongest therapeutic vibration machine available today, a machine popular in the 70s, 80s and 90s, called G5.

We actually went even further and asked the manufacturer to produce an even stronger machine than those available commercially. Predictably, cellulite did decrease and skin firmness did improve, but only at the expense of spider veins (also known as thread veins) appearing on the treated areas.

Since replacing one evil with another is not a good idea, we gave up on localised vibration-based treatments for cellulite.

Incidentally, for the exact same reason (plus its negative effect on skin firmness), we also abandoned roller-suction treatments (treatments that utilise vacuum suction with rolling, also known as palper-rouler treatments).

We then switched to a manual method for a few years, before finally offering the deep-acting, high-power radio frequency and ultrasound cavitation we currently use at our practice.

Bones, tendons and ligaments: where vibration plate training really shines

Where vibration platform training really shines, is at boosting bone density and thereby fighting osteoporosis (the reason it was originally developed for) and also at strengthening ligaments, tendons, cartilage and hard connective tissue in general.

This is due to the strong, intermittent gravity effect it provides to those tissues.

Skin (including cellulite, which is an actual part of the skin), blood vessels, muscles and fat tissue, being softer connective tissues, still benefit, as we explained above, but not as much as hard tissues do.

The effect of vibration plate training is similar to that of acoustic wave therapy (shockwave therapy). Acoustic wave therapy (AWT) works well on hard tissues (ideal to help set bones and heal tendons and ligaments) but it is pretty useless for fat / cellulite reduction, despite all the hype created by all the misleading PR.

Maximising the results of your power plate training

To maximise the results of your power plate training on ALL your connective tissues, you should consider taking the following collagen-boosting, connective tissue protecting and blood vessel strengthening nutrients orally, in the form of a supplement.

Furthermore, local skin application of the same nutrients, in the form of a good anti-cellulite cream that contains those nutrients, will provide a more focused effect on skin, fat and cellulite.

Both local application, in the form of a concentrated cellulite cream and oral intake should be done just before, or immediately after, exercise on the vibration plate:

• Centella asiatica extract (95% purity or higher for creams)

• Hydroxyproline (100% purity or higher for creams)

• Vitamin C (100% purity or higher for creams)

• Pine bark extract (95% purity or higher for creams)

• High flavanol cocoa extract (95% purity or higher for creams)

• Proanthocyanidins, anthocyanins, flavonoids, e.g. cranberry extract, bilberry extract, hesperidin (95% purity or higher for creams)

• EGCG from green tea extract (95% purity or higher for creams)

• Curcumin from turmeric (95% purity or higher for creams)

• Hydrolysed collagen (oral intake only)

There are several other nutrients available in supplement form (more available) or in cream form (more rare) that may be useful, but these are the most important ones.

How to use vibration training for cellulite reduction, safely and effectively

The moral of the story is:

• First of all, stop chasing miracle treatments - they do not exist. Just don't believe the hype.

• Do train up to three times a week on a vibration plate, performing squats, calf raises and lunges for up to twenty minutes. Stick to twenty minutes - more is not better.

• Combine this training with serious diet and cardiovascular exercise for maximum results

• Combine with course of deep-acting, high-power radiofrequency and deep acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation, the strongest SAFE anti-cellulite technologies known today, ideally received just before or immediately after your power plate training.

• Use a quality cellulite cream, ideally one with high concentrations of multiple active ingredients and applying it immediately before or after the training for maximum results

• Do not even think of lying on the machine to lose your love handles or belly fat or sit on it to have a firmer bum

Vibration plate before and after pics: don’t pay much attention to them, 95%+ are fake

Vibration plate training cannot deliver spot fat reduction (i.e. local fat loss), so you would not see any difference in any real photos. Again, I’m repeating myself: spot fat reduction or spot cellulite reduction with exercise does NOT exist and something that does not exist cannot be displayed in any “before and after” pictures.

Furthermore, a good 95% or more of the so-called “before and after” photos you see on the web or (God forbid…) on Instagram and TikTok are simply fake (Instagram and TikTok are a cesspool of fake “before and after” pics).

The fact is that real photographs, honestly taken, cannot display subtle changes which have to do with skin tightening and cellulite reduction, even though these changes are easy to see with the naked eye, feel in your body and touch with your hands.

Plus the average Joe/Jane cannot easily detect those changes, especially on a dimmed mobile phone display - or even on a proper computer screen. Take it from an ex-photographer who scoured through millions of post-production pictures of people with a loupe in his previous career.

So most people (beauty therapists, aesthetic doctors, equipment manufacturing companies, skincare manufacturing companies, clinics, bloggers, vloggers, Tiktokers, Instagrammers, tabloid newspapers, the lot) resort to fake “before and after” photos to show some differences the untrained eye of the average Joe/Jane can easily see and consider worthwhile before buying the product.

This usually happens with:

• either different lighting before and after (again, as a photographer I can spot them in a second)

• or photo editing apps

• or breathing in/out, for stomach before/after photos (yes, they become that pathetic)

• or displaying the “before body” larger and the “after body” smaller in the pictures

• or using a different camera angle

• or using a different body position

The opportunities to mislead consumers are endless…

Because of this constant desensitisation of the eye, due to exaggerated and fake “before and after pictures”, consumers need to see spectacularly fake results to pay any attention.

In fact, it is almost nigh on impossible for honest companies or people who publish real (and, by definition, modest appearing) ‘before and after’ photos, to compete with all the fake ones out there.

So even though vibration plate training is great for lymphatic drainage, skin tightening, cellulite reduction and bone/tendon/ligament/muscle strengthening, that will not show in any honest “vibration plate before and after” pictures, so don’t bother.

Vibration plate is great and it works - take this from someone who does not even sell anything to do with vibration plate training.

So get out there, practice some regular vibration training safely, and see, feel and touch your own results. Just don’t expect the ‘before and after pictures’ you take of your own results to be spectacular enough to impress other people with on a mobile screen.

So does vibration plate work?

Absolutely, vibration plate training works for bone, ligament, tendon and muscle strengthening, skin tightening, cellulite prevention and circulation enhancement / lymphatic drainage, if used properly, as described above.

And vibration plate training does NOT work if you are looking for “vibration plate weight loss before and after” (as we mentioned above, good luck with that) or if you expect it reduce local fat, cellulite or skin looseness just because you sit on it.

Have a skin tightening/cellulite treatment in London with the experts

At LipoTherapeia we have specialised 100% in skin tightening and cellulite reduction for more than two decades and 20,000+ sessions.

This is all we study and practise every day and have researched and tried hands-on all the important skin tightening equipment and their manufacturers.

As strong, deep acting radiofrequency and deep-acting, high-power ultrasound cavitation are the technologies of choice for skin tightening and cellulite reduction, we have invested in the best RF/ultrasound technologies in the world.

Furthermore, over the last two decades we have developed advanced RF and cavitation treatment protocols in order to make the most of our technologies, for maximum results, naturally and safely.

Our radiofrequency/ultrasound treatments are comfortable, pain-free, downtime-free, injection-free, microneedling-free, 99.5%+ safe and always non-invasive.

And our focus is on honest, realistic, science-based treatment, combined with caring, professional service, with a smile.

We will be pleased to see you, assess your cellulite, skin laxity or fibrosis, listen to your story, discuss your case and offer you the best possible treatment.

Learn more or check prices and book an expert treatment at our London clinic (49 Marylebone High Street, W1)