Your muscles will feel more energized after 20 minutes on this vibrating surface.

By Sarah Zlotnick

It’s 1:12 PM, and I’m still on the road. My appointment at Bethesda’s Equinox Gym was supposed to begin at 1, but I’m still inching up Wisconsin Avenue (It’s a Wednesday, people—aren’t you supposed to be at work?!) and in a pretty awful mood. My muscles ache with dull pain from sitting in an office chair for nine hours a day (and in traffic for the past hour and a half), and now my only workout for the week has been cut down by almost a full 15 minutes.??After screeching into a nearby parking garage, I frantically change in the front seat (please tell me after-the-fact confessions can’t get you arrested for public nudity) and sprint over to the facility. Equinox’s smiling Joe Sigismondo whisks me upstairs. At 1:21, I finally come face to face with the reason I volunteered for this trek in the first place: the Power Plate.
The Power Plate, originally developed to help astronauts rapidly gain muscle, is a vibrating platform large enough to accommodate the average person performing a deep squat. Since it was developed for commercial use in 1999, celebs such as Madonna, Kelly Osbourne, and Courtney Cox have gushed about it being a quick way to get in an intense workout—and I’ve been dying to try it.??As you perform basic exercises such as push ups, stretches, and squats on the plate, the targeted muscles involuntary contract at a rate of 25 to 50 times per second. This helps maintain balance in reaction to the vibration, thereby causing increased blood flow and deeper stimulation.??If you’ve ever been victim to electroshock therapy while recovering from a knee injury, the sensation of the Power Plate is similar, but much less intense. Plus it spreads past the area being targeted into muscles you wouldn’t normally work when performing standing calisthenics.??There are three different settings on the machine: hertz (vibrations per second), amplitude (height of vibration), and time. As a first-timer, Joe recommends I start off on 30-30-low—that’s 30 vibrations per second, with the platform moving mere millimeters up and down. We begin with basic stretches like lunges and a position similar to child’s pose to stretch my shoulders, holding for 30 seconds at a time.

After these short bursts, my hamstrings are already tingling the way they would after 15 minutes on a treadmill. Joe mentions the Power Plate is a great way to warm up before a cardio session, since it loosens muscles and increases blood flow far more effectively than traditional standing stretches.??Next, we work through two sets of step-ups, squats, planks, and modified V-sits. Once my body realizes that the key to feeling the full effects of the vibrations is to perform slow, controlled movements, and to hold my position—no matter how hard my muscles are moving—I begin to understand why one Marie Claire staffer wrote that she felt “completely drained” after just 20 minutes on the thing. I’m not quite there yet, though, so Joe turns my timer up to 45 seconds, and we start on push ups and cable rows for my arms. After the second set of push ups, I’m almost ready to collapse; it’s only been a minute and a half, and my arms feel more engaged than after a half-hour session on the weight machines.??Lastly, Joe walks me through two “massages.” My favorite is for the trapezius muscle. For this massage, Joe tells me to sit on the floor with my back against the base of the plate and hold the cable rows attached to the machine tightly across my body. I feel the vibration deep in my shoulders, and the ache of hunching over a keyboard all day seems to melt away.