Seriously, the way vibration training works is that it enhances your movements, it makes them harder to perform. It’s not about just standing, sitting or lying there and doing nothing. You are performing push-ups, squats or crunches while your muscles have to work against the vibration. The muscles can’t relax.
For instance, if you perform a set of 20 free (=bodyweight) squats on a power plate, this is going to be much harder than 20 free squats on the floor. Exactly how much more work the muscle has to perform under these conditions can be measured. People who train this way should be exhausted afterwards. It’s not a lazy man’s substitute for a real workout.
The studies mentioned above certainly weren’t all commissioned by the company that sells these machines.
For fitness?? Nope. If you have a wasting disease or your muscles are atrophying because you’re paralyzed or in a coma, that may be helpful. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.
But it is so far beneath even walking as a form of exercise, you will not improve your fitness with an electrical stimulation device.
The XKCD comic used a p value of 0.05, while this study shows a p-value of less than 0.001. The effects aren’t large, but they are statistically significant to a much higher degree than the comic you showed.
With a sample size of 26, of which half are in the control? I’m not sure that that’s even mathematically possible (but I’m not a statistician, so I will leave it to someone else to prove my case).
This thread is about vibrating belts, not power plates. Though, in retrospect, I am uncertain which the quoted study is refering to. Can anyone read the study? I’d be curious to know what the Control group was doing and what their definition of “athlete” is.
