Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Good, good, good, good vibrations.

Yes, I'm not a member of the Beach Boys, but we're talking good vibrations today and we're not talking the peace and love good vibes.

We're talking about whole body vibration therapy and how a daily shake-up can help manage chronic pain, boost your fitness performance and even support your immune system.

My guest today, Dr. Jason Convisor, Chief Science Advisor for Power Plate, is here to discuss the health benefits of whole body vibration.

He has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, Cardiac Rehabilitation and an MA in Exercise Physiology and is best known for his work with patients dealing with metabolic syndrome, obesity and providing exercise strategies for those who have literally given up.

We'll discuss how Power Plate, a vibration platform used by celebrities, pro-athletes and me, can help you boost energy levels, support healthy bone density and improve your overall quality of life even if you're not big on exercise.

So stay tuned. We'll be right back to discuss vibrational therapy and power plate.

Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Convisor. So what is whole body vibration?

First of all, thank you for inviting me. Whole body vibration is a platform that you can stand on, sit on. You can use as part of your daily movement activities.

You can use it to enhance the traditional exercises that you would normally be doing and for individuals at the two ends of the spectrums from the elite athlete to the individual who is really in a medical fitness environment allows us to stimulate the body in a safe, effective way.

So they get the results that they're looking for. It's not the only piece of exercise equipment that you would have in a gym, but it certainly is a wonderful piece to add to any exercise regimen.

So people go to the gym, do a lot of gyms have some version of a body vibrating machine or is this something you probably wouldn't see in everybody's gym?

It's a it's the perfect question in environments where the personal training staff or the staff that develop programs for special needs either at the higher end or lower end almost always you have some kind of vibration platform that's made available.

It's only in the last four or five years that it has now come to the center where vibration is used as a modality for the average individual to use when they want to enhance their exercise to modify their exercise to get a little bit different feel from the exercise that they would normally be doing.

So when we're talking about vibrational therapy, that's not shaking ourselves vigorously and that's not necessarily jumping on a rebounder. This is something totally different, correct?

100% and maybe the biggest mistake 40, 45 years ago was starting to use the term whole body vibration. Basically, it's a platform that does vibrate, but when positioned on the platform when you're in the correct position that you shouldn't be feeling it in the head, you should feel it as a massage or as a stimulus to the body, not as a violent attack on the body.

If it doesn't feel good, you're probably not doing it right. The nice part about the devices that we talk about in our clinics is that they're created in such a way that it's pretty hard to do something that doesn't feel good.

The vibration allows us to take the head away and stimulate the muscles so we get a better muscle contraction, better circulation. I usually describe it as to prepare for exercise, to perform with exercise, and to recover from exercise. It helps us in all three of those tracks.

Let's step back. How did you first become aware of this and the benefits? What made you want to study this and become the expert that you are in vibrational therapy?

20 years ago, give or take, I was asked to look at this machine that shakes as you described. Everything in my training, all of my experience, all of my publications, but what a crazy thing to have a machine that would shake the body, what possible benefit could you have from it?

Then I started to not only look at the literature and the history of vibration, but then started to include it in my research with my patients in my clinics, and I was finding that all kinds of benefits could be achieved.

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