Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to get moving and shape up.

My name is Brock Armstrong and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

Whole body vibration training promises some impressive fitness and health benefits, but is shaking it on a vibrating platform as good for you as just doing some regular

old exercise? Although these rather bland-looking platforms are only recently popping up in

gyms and spas, whole body vibration training, or WBVT, has been around for quite a long time. According to the biomedical journal, the ancient Greeks

were the first to think that shaking the human body would elicit some faster healing.

Ancient Greek doctors used body vibration machines as a therapeutic methodology to help

soldiers recover from their injuries.

Their version was a bow-like wooden instrument that they would pluck the strings on to create

vibrations over cuts and wounds.

The Greek doctors observed that the vibrations allowed pus to drain from the wounds more freely, while also healing the

wounds faster. Then, in the 1860s, Swedish medical student Jonas Gustav Zander explored the

connection between mechanics of the body and muscle building. He went on to establish the

therapeutic Zander Institute in Stockholm,

which used machines to help workers correct physical impairments. Now, Zander believed

vibration therapy could be a way to increase weight loss and muscle gain in his patients.

Then, in the 1960s, Russian scientists embraced vibration therapy, dubbing

it rhythmic neuromuscular stimulation. They believed that they had discovered a way to support

not only muscle building, but also a way to help stimulate bone regeneration.

Then in 1995, the cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, the Iron Man

of Space Flight, lived in space for 438 days without losing very much bone density thanks

to whole body vibration training. In fact, instead of being carried from the Soyuz spacecraft to a nearby

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