Many years ago, my brother-in-law was renovating an 18th-century house in New Orleans. As I spent the day searching through piles of moldy copies of Peanuts comics, I found a (still working!) 1950s-style fat-jiggler machine. From the Remington Beltmaster to the classic Shake Weight, many gimmicky fitness devices over the years have tried to capitalize on the concept of dynamic inertia to help us get toned and lose weight.
Most human beings don’t like to move, even though moving is how you maintain your muscle mass and, you know, how you stay alive. A vibrating device offers you a mystical promise: You can trick yourself into exercising while staying absolutely still, as long as you’re standing on, near, or holding something that’s vibrating! Violently!
Anyway, this is a long way to go about saying that for a few weeks, I have been vibrating myself while watching Train to Busan and other zombie movies. While I do think that the long-standing claims that you can vibrate your way to weight loss are mostly bogus, they do have some real benefits.
Jiggle Jiggle
If you’ve never seen or heard of a vibration plate, don’t worry, you will. Every mildly fitness-interested person has gotten served ads for these. Right now, I’m using the Merach vibration plate. (I used to have the EZLife HitGo ($100), but it inexplicably stopped working a month or so ago.) The Merach version feels sturdy and is incredibly easy to set up. Just plug it in and pop some AAA batteries into the included remote.
The slim manual explains that there are five presets. You can also switch from manual mode to auto mode, which will gradually increase the intensity as time passes.
The plate feels weighty and sturdy, especially for the price. It has silicone lugs on top so that you can’t slip off, although everyone in my family does cheats and stands on it without shoes. The weight limit is up to 330 pounds, which is pretty substantial. (Multiple people in my family could get on at the same time.) This is the compact version, so it’s only 20.3 inches across and about 5 inches high. It’s pretty easy to tuck under the couch when I’m not using it.
Multiple vibration-plate TikToks (I have been researching extensively) note that you can start to see physical changes in as little as 20 minutes of whole-body vibration a day. I didn’t even need to wait 20 minutes. After two or three minutes, the skin of my thighs turned red and started itching violently. It turns out this is a known reaction to whole-body vibration, and it’s probably a mild histamine release from the sudden capillary dilation. (I do not experience anything like this on other parts of my body with a handheld massager.)
I run four or five times a week and am relatively active, but I’ve never experienced anything like this. After two weeks, I worked my way up to 10 minutes on the plate at a time, but I can’t say I have enjoyed any of the sessions.
There are many vibration plate workouts online, depending on whether your goal is to lose weight, build muscle, or reduce the risk of falls. I opted to do my normal at-home strength training routine of dumbbell lunges, weighted squats, and push-ups, while using the plate. For what it’s worth, my fitness trackers do not register any increase in heart rate when I do a strength workout on the plate versus off the plate, so I don’t think I’m burning any more calories than I would without it.
Wiggle Wiggle
Photograph: Adrienne So
I was fully prepared to write about how this viral TikTok device doesn’t really do anything more for you than getting outside and walking around the block would, and that it didn’t really do anything for me except give me a weird thigh rash.