Arthritis sufferers often comment how good vibration therapy feels. The vibration exercise machines allow people with arthritis to strengthen their muscles and joints with less stress on the joints than regular strength training. This is a good thing since most people with arthritis are reluctant to engage in any strengthening exercises. Experience with regular strength training may have been unfavorable. They may have pushed themselves too much, thereby leading to pain, swelling and stiffness. Let’s take a look at how to integrate vibration exercise into your arthritis exercise program.
Vibration therapy limits stress on the joints
Vibration exercise allows a person to get a significant amount of muscle strengthening exercises without impact on the joints. Exactly how does this work? Let’s take knee arthritis as an example. Have you tried doing some form of strength training? If so, did you feel pain as you tried bending your knees more? With vibration exercise, you can simply place yourself on the platform in a semi squat position where YOU feel comfortable. The platform will then go up and down instead of you. This elicits over 3000 muscle contractions in 1 minute. Now, you are getting that strength training program while putting yourself in a position that’s comfortable. You can increase the ‘difficulty’ of the exercise simply by increasing the intensity on the machine rather than doing more difficult and painful exercises.
With any form of arthritis, strengthening the muscles around the joints is the common sense approach. However, as we can see in the previous example, one can be limited by mobility or pain. Vibration exercise can generate these muscle contractions without putting as much stress on your body. Not only do you need to strengthen your muscles, there can also be stiffness of the joints and eventually the muscles around the joint. Therefore, engaging in some form of gentle stretching is also beneficial. This too can be done with the vibration effect. Last thing is to increase blood flow around the joint. This can be done in the form of deep massage exercises with a vibration exercise platform.
Vibration therapy involves more than just standing on a machine
As you can see, arthritis management is not just about standing on a vibration machine. Incorporating flexibility, deep massage work, and eventually functional training can go a long way in ensuring that your arthritic joint is protected by strong and flexible muscles. When looking to begin a workout, first ask yourself what your goals are. Is it to get less pain? Or is it to be able to move better? What if its to just get looser so you aren’t as tight? First find out what your goal is. Then work towards a specific exercise that will help you with your goal. That’s why doing an vibration exercise program is not cookie cutter. It has to take into consideration what your needs are. Next thing to look at is how you will progress yourself with your program. How fast should you proceed? Do you increase the settings on the machine or do a harder exercise? All too often, people tend to just do the same thing and add more time. That’s not the way to go. We’ve seen people do the same type of easy exercise, yet increase the intensity settings on the vibration platform. They also then increase the level of difficulty of the exercise. After that, you can decrease your rest time to make it more difficult. Most important point to remember is to increase everything but the time. With respect to time, settle for about 2 minutes of vibration per body part. So if you do a 30 second squat exercise, do it 4 times. That’s it! Don’t think for a second that you need to do more. Remember, make the exercise harder and you will see that time is the last thing to increase.
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