The Best Vibration Plate Machines in 2023 – Our Expert Reviews

Best Vibration Plate Machines At A Glance

Vibration machines (also known as shaking machines, shaking platforms, vibration platforms, vibration plates, or vibration plate machines) generate whole-body vibrations to force your muscles to contract reflexively as well as make it slightly harder to keep your balance while you work out.

Vibration machines are available in some gyms, but many are also compact and affordable enough for home use.  Some are designed to stand on, some to sit on, but some of the best vibration plates are adjustable for either sitting or standing.

Generally, people perform exercises like sit-ups, pushups or squats, or lightweight dumbbell exercises on vibration machines, but newer vibration plates are often designed to be used with resistance bands for a wider variety of exercises.

Right now, there’s some evidence that vibration plate therapy can make workouts more effective, contributing to greater fat loss and muscle growth.  There’s also initial evidence that they can lower inflammation and improve gut health.

In this article, we’ll explain the best ways to use vibration machines for exercise, how much they can really accelerate your fat loss and muscle gains and show you the best vibration plates on the market.    

How To Use A Vibration Plate To Lose Weight

A vibration plate will increase the amount of energy you expend during a workout, though possibly to a fairly minor degree.  That said, vibration plate training with bodyweight exercises is at least roughly comparable to traditional strength plus cardio training– and can be made more effective by adding resistance in the form of light dumbbells or resistance bands.  

The use of a vibration plate increases the metabolic cost of exercise by about 20%.  How much this amounts to in total depends on how much time you spend using the vibration plate– studies that find significant benefits generally have subjects using the plate for at least an hour and a half a week.  However, the longer you use it, the more calories it will burn– you should probably aim to use it for at least 2 hours a week, assuming this is your main workout.

You’ll also want to use the vibration plate to produce whole-body muscle fatigue and metabolic stress.  That means performing a variety of exercises that hit every body part– squats, push-ups, crunches, banded rows, and more.

Finally, remember that fat loss requires a caloric deficit, and that comes primarily from eating less– exercise is of secondary importance.  You have to combine vibration training with cutting back on fats, carbs, and between-meal snacks.  The good news is, simultaneous modest improvements in both your diet and your workouts can produce outsized results.  

How To Use A Vibration Machine: Vibration Plate Exercises And Workout

Nearly any light-weight exercise that can be performed at home, sitting or standing, can be done on a vibration plate.  The exercise needs to use either no weight, resistance bands, or light dumbbells, and not involve moving across the room– i.e. no farmer’s walks or lateral walks.  

You can’t do anything that involves not being on the ground, like pull-ups, on a vibration machine.  Jumps are out too, as jumping on a vibration plate is dangerous to both you and the equipment. 

Most anything else could work though.  In general, you should either be standing or sitting on the vibration plate, except for exercises like pushups or hand planks, in which case you want your hands to be on the vibration machine. 

Vibration Plate Exercises For Belly Fat

There’s a commonly held belief that abdominal exercises can preferentially burn belly fat.  The overwhelming majority of fitness experts will tell you this is a myth. 

The thing is, it’s not a myth– spot reduction is real if a bit overstated.  You can target belly fat.

In practice the way to do this would be to have a small amount of protein an hour before the workout, then do 20 minutes of mostly abdominal exercises, followed by some cardio, and then not eat again for an hour or two.  That would boost blood flow to the abdominal region while keeping the body in a catabolic state following the workout, burning belly fat during and after the workout.

The best vibration machine exercises for targeting belly fat would be things like ab crunches, bicycle crunches, front planks, side planks, and mountain climbers.  A 20-minute circuit of just those exercises followed by cardio or a long walk, plus a short fast, would burn belly fat.  

Vibration Plate Exercises For Beginners

The whole notion of an exercise for beginners is a bit misguided– beginners can mostly do the same exercises as advanced trainees, just with less weight.  That said, if you’re totally untrained and new to vibration plates, it may be easiest to start with unweighted exercises.

A few vibration machine exercises that should be easy to start with:

Push-Ups or Knee Push-Ups

This is near the bottom of a pushup.  Note that you could remove the seat and instead place your hands on the vibration plate itself; I just found grabbing the handles more comfortable.

Air Squats

Note how my thighs are parallel to the ground here– you’ll want to go at least this deep on a squat.

Hand Front Planks

A hand plank essentially means you hold the top position of a pushup. Again, I found it more comfortable to use the bars, but removing them and putting my hands on the plate would be a bit more difficult since I’d be at a lower angle, effectively raising my weight.

Ab Crunches

This is almost as far back as you can move your back during an ab crunch without losing balance.

Hip Thrusts

Here I’m performing hip thrusts from a deficit; by elevating my feet, I can drop my butt below my feet for a greater range of motion. The vibration plate can go under either your back or your feet, but your back should be at a higher elevation than your feet. Of course if you don’t do them from a deficit, your feet will be on the ground and the plate will be under your back.

Resistance Band Shoulder Presses

These are the resistance bands that came with the vibration plate. They’re not very good; I recommend getting a separate set of resistance bands to use for vibration machine resistance band exercises.

Vibration Plate Workout

Vibration plates increase muscular hypertrophy, allowing you to build muscle with very short, light workouts. They also make those workouts more tiring, as you’ll see in the next section.

The best vibration plate workout, then, will be short (20-30 minutes) and full-body.  Luckily, most of the best vibration plates will allow for both seated and standing exercises, and many vibration plates are also designed to incorporate resistance bands.     

Here’s an example of a good vibration machine workout you can get through in 20 minutes:

A) Pushups, to fatigue (hands on the machine, feet on the ground) If you can do more than 20, elevate your feet on a stool or couch to make it harder

B) Air squats, 12-20 reps (if you can do more than 20, do goblet squats with a light dumbbell or kettlebell)

C) Ab crunches, to fatigue (sitting on the vibration plate)

D) Standing resistance band shoulder press, 8-12 reps

E) Hip thrust (feet on the machine, hands on the ground) 12-20 reps (if you can do more than 20, elevate your hands on a couch or bench so your butt can dip below your hands)

F) Front plank, to fatigue

G) Jump lunges, as many as possible for 30 seconds (this doesn’t use the vibration plate at all but is a good finisher)

Perform as many circuits of this as possible in 20 minutes– when you hit the 20-minute mark, finish the circuit you’re on.

Vibration Plate Before And After

Studies show that vibration plates can help trainees build muscle, as well as boost the metabolic cost of exercise to burn more fat.  

On one hand, studies have mostly found results in untrained and overweight subjects, so it;’s unclear how useful they are to already-fit trainees.  On the other hand, studies almost always use very short and light vibration plate workouts– you could definitely work out harder, add weight, and overall get more use out of your vibration machine than the subjects in those studies.

Based on the research, a couple of hours a week of vibration training might be good for building a few pounds of muscle over a few months or burning an extra half-pound of fat a week.  Maybe a bit more if you use them for more than 2 hours a week. 

Anecdotally, people who try vibration machines like them, find they produce harder workouts and experience better results with them.  Interestingly, many people report that vibration machines make workouts more whole-body– as this man notes, when he uses one, he can “feel the burn” in muscles that would normally not be seeing much fatigue from the exercises he’s doing.

Some people do see dramatic results from vibration plate training, like Ramon who used it to help make progress in overcoming morbid obesity.   Notably, obese people often find the vibration plate helps not only by burning more calories but by enhancing drainage and providing relief from excess fluid retention.  

That said, such results are not entirely due to the vibration plate– diet and hard work matter a lot too, and a vibration plate alone won’t do much without following a solid diet and exercise program. 

Vibration Plate Reviews: The Best Vibration Plate Machine For Different Use Cases

Two things to note about all of these.

First, all of the cords are rather short, around 3-4 feet, so I recommend an extension cord to allow you to situate your vibration plate as needed.

Second, they all come with resistance bands, but those bands tend to not offer very good resistance, and in any case, a good resistance band workout requires a few different bands with different resistance levels.  In other words, if you want to use resistance bands with these, you might want to buy a separate, full set of resistance bands.

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Studies And Research You Can Read About Vibration Training And Therapy

• Whole-body vibration changes the microbiome, lowers inflammation (Medical News Today, 2019)
• The effects of whole body vibration therapy on reducing fat mass in the adult general population: A systematic review and meta-analyses (Journal of Musculoskeletal & Neuronal Interactions, 2019)
• Effects of 24 weeks of whole body vibration training on body composition and muscle strength in untrained females (International Journal of Sports Medicine, 2004)
• Metabolic effect of bodyweight whole-body vibration in a 20-min exercise session: A crossover study using verified vibration stimulus (Public Library of Science, 2018)

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Editor’s note: we are regularly updating this review. If you see any problems, weird interpretations of the data, or just want to say hi, please reach out to hello@the-unwinder.com.