How Whole Body Vibration Hacks Fitness & Fat Loss – Tony Molina : 963

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey, formerly Bulletproof Radio. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today we're going to talk about a biohack that you probably haven't heard of, but something that has a long and storied history. It's something that people said I was nuts for talking about when I first introduced the field of biohacking 10 years ago. In fact, they made fun of me for it. But there was so much science that I was willing to deal with it because if it was good enough for NASA and Russia and East Germany and things like that, like, I wonder if they're all just crazy or maybe they just like to do what works. Yeah, I'm talking about whole body vibration. So I've got a great guest on the show for you today. We're going to talk about what it does to your physiology, what it is, how you can change your strength, your bone density, your circulation, your flexibility and a lot of other things you might not expect by standing on a platform that does something you wouldn't expect. And our guest is a human performance expert named Tony Molina who has presented a couple times at Tony Robbins Platinum Partnership on elite Performance. He was an amphibious reconnaissance Marine team leader in the first Gulf War during Desert Storm and a Navy SEAL obstacle course record holder and for almost a decade was an elite professional racer on expedition racing. And this if you don't know about expedition racing, these are non stop, 24 hour a day, 500 mile courses in remote locations. In other words, Tony's a professional masochist. Tony, welcome to the show.

I like that. Thank you.

You should have that on your, on your LinkedIn profile, just as the headline Professional masochist.

You know, one of the expedition races we did in the Eco challenge was in B.C. and it crossed 4 or 500 km right there in your home terrain there. So that was, you know, 60, 70,000 vertical feet of terrain in five days, 24 hours a day.

So could be really dangerous. Just the sheer number of rainforest slugs up here. You could slide on one of those and, you know, skin your knee. I mean it could be terrible.

Yeah, there's a, there's a bush called Slide Alder that is the, is the middle ground between the glacier and the high mountain. And the Slide alder is so tough that it almost ripped all of our clothes off while we were moving from the lowland to get to the glacier.

Wow. I mean, I've done some high altitude mountaineering, nothing like you, but it can Be rough up there. Things are not what most people expect. And to do 500 miles in five days, that's not even in my universe of how the heck would I do that. You went through all of this, I'm going to call it self abuse, lovingly. And you ended up as a high altitude and longevity researcher and you're at Power Plate, which is, I'd say the preeminent manufacturer of whole body vibration plates. How did you get into longevity and high altitude relationships when you kind of come from the background you come. How did you get into longevity and high altitude relationships when you kind of come from the background you come from?

You know, when I went to my first high school reunion, they had a, they had a contest for who looked the most alike when, you know, when you showed up. So they put us on stage and I was voted the most. I looked the same from, you know, 10 years ago. Then I went back at the 20 year reunion and I got voted again as the person that looked the most similar to when they graduated high school. And this kind of kept going and so I started to really look at longevity and lifestyle. And that was at the same time occurring with the high altitude alpinism that I've been doing for a couple decades. So I take people to high altitude all over the world, South America, the Himalayas, all through volcano alley and six 7,000 meter objectives. And as a necessity, people wouldn't go and spend two, three weeks to do these things because they have to go to work and they can't just stick around that long. So I compress these types of objectives and these expeditions into a long weekend which, you know, having enough work done in hypoxia and high altitude, you can't really cheat the system. You're going to end up, you'll end up with edema either in your brain or in your lungs. And you know, it could be significant. You know, it's not a good, it's not a good version for your survival. That being said, I actually started to piece together the reasons and the vectors around why we're actually having these challenges at high altitude.

Each time I got to experiment with my biohacks. And this was earlier in life, I didn't know what I know now. But every time I took mitochondrial resuscitants, even things like D ribose, which is a special sugar that helps with mitochondrial performance, and other various things, including something that Tibetans use at high altitude, yak butter tea, like, who would have thought? Why does it work? And it always for me came down to mitochondria and I like, wow, how cool is it that we have a chance to do an interview because we can talk about that kind of nerdy stuff and whole body vibration in the same universe. And that's just an unlikely thing because manipulating pressure on the body like you would do with an oxy health hyperbaric chamber or mold. People who've had serious toxic mold like I have, and almost everyone with Lyme disease who actually has mold poisoning and Lyme disease, when you take them to high altitude, they feel better and like there's all these things around VEGF and all these other things going on and you know more about that than I do. At least that's the sensation that I get. So tell me, what is magic about high altitude? Is it the pressure, is it the oxygen? What's the deal?

It's a great question. There's a couple vectors that are going on. You've got the altitude mechanism, which is the partial pressure change, you have the temperature change and yet you have the actual altitude part. The pressure mechanism seems to be the major one. That's the rate limiting step for human function. So you can, you can only cheat so much to address that process and that, that's regulated by the hypoxic inducible factor 1 HIF1. So that's one of the master regulators of human function. So it's really the most still research field in the world is obviously we deal with hypoxia till the end of our life. So we're looking at this in all different facets.

So HIF1 Alpha you're talking about. There is a longevity thing you can manipulate. It changes when you get in a sauna, it changes when you exercise, it changes when you do breath work and it changes when you go to high altitude, right? So it's this cool thing. The definition of biohacking change the environment around you and inside of you, so you have control of your own biology. And well, there's certainly pressure, there's gas levels like oxygen and CO2 and stuff like that, and vibration or sound even, those are also environmental variables. So it turns out you're an expert in a couple of those, right? You're dealing with the pressure, things that happen that change HIF1 alpha. But then you can look at vibration. Does whole body vibration also affect HIF1 alpha because it's more efficient exercise.

It can, it depends on the length and the frequency. As you know, if you hold your breath, you can influence HIF1 Alpha. So if you're combining breath work with whole body Vibration. You can begin to implement the mechanism that way. Having spent so much time at extreme altitude and looking at the literature around it, we don't really want to live at extreme altitude as much as we want to intermittently go in and out of the extreme altitude.

Thank you for saying that. Intermittent cycling on almost everything seems like it's the way to do it. You don't want to be in ketosis forever. You don't want to be cold forever, you don't want to be hot forever. You go in and out. And I've seen a lot of people who live at high altitude run into problems, but I feel like a great golden God when I'm at 18,000ft or something. I'm like, ah. And I might feel dizzy for a day or two. I might suck on some coca leaves or take some supplements or whatever, but I don't know how long that lasts. Is there like an elation that you get once you get acclimated? Is it a six week thing? Is it a three day thing? I don't even know.

It's a great question. It's a range. So it depends is usually the answer. You can look at about a two week cycle of the changes, the morphological changes that occur when you're dealing with altitude. So then you're looking to, you know, time your window around like big ascents in that, in that short window. But then there's a crossover effect that carries over for about two to three weeks after you've left the altitude. But as you just said, the pulsing and cycling of the altitude seems to be the best version of all these things, not the consistent. Because then you end up with, you're in the survival paradox, right? So now you're, you're driving too much of a survival system. And then there's a, there's a catch to that as well. Metabolism is, is a, it's a wild ride. It's like a whitewater river.

I feel like we're still gaining an understanding of exactly what levers and knobs and dials to push for what person to get what result. But we know way more now than we did. And maybe my metabolism is going to be less responsive than yours. So you might need 20 minutes of stimulation to get somewhere and I might need 30 minutes. Right. And so we're using big data and machine learning and it's a big part of what I'm doing in upgrade labs where just I want to get enough data from enough people to know, like, here's how you create change for people who don't want to spend all day in the gym, which doesn't seem to work very well.

One of the main things with this process and why power plate and whole body vibration is so preeminent, is that most people, they're not flexible metabolically. So then if they end up doing things like they're traveling to the Himalayas or they're going to Machu Picchu, right, It's not even that high. It's 4,000 meters. But if their metabolism is not flexible, then they're already. They're under the insults even when they begin. So they never really get to have that euphoria that you're describing, which is like, that's the idea. You feel better, right? If you're a little bit cold, you're a little hungry, and you're a little out of breath, you generally feel a little better. So that's that micro dosing, in a sense, or cycling and pulsing of these types of strategies for health.

All right, let's talk some more about whole body vibration, because, you know, one group of people is going to say, you know, is this like those waistbands you'd see from like the 1950s at a hotel spa or something? I remember those from when I was maybe like 9 or 10 years old. There's some old installation somewhere, and they had those at this hotel. I'm like, what is this thing? And you hold on to this weird thing, and that's maybe what most people think of, or they think of the Motel six things. You put a quarter in, the bed vibrates. So what is whole body vibration? What's its history? Just walk me through what it is. And since I've spent actually 18 years playing around with it, I know some stuff that's really harmful in the industry, but I want to know what your take on it is because you work for the top company. So walk me through the history.

What is it? I call it the ultimate exercise biohack because it's used by pro athletes like Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, doctors, biohackers, celebrities like Mo, Mark Wahlberg, NFL teams. It does so many things. This biohack helps you burn more calories. It helps you increase strength and reaction time. You can improve skin and circulation, bone density, pain relief, hormonal changes, posture, balance. On that note, it's also a lifelong health and longevity partner in the 10 things around the system I developed for living to 150 years.

That's it. 150 is your goal? That's it. 150 is your Goal?

Yeah. I think at this point I'm pleased with 150 because I figure I'm 54 chronologically and I'm about 34 biologically.

That's only 30 years better than our current best. And you're already so far ahead of.

The curve like, well, I'm all open to change at this exact moment. That number is fine because it, it allows me to have some time dilation, right? Because if I don't set the number, then I have a time constriction possibility, which is what most people are under. So at 150, I'm, I'm, I don't even have to think about it. I just kind of set it aside and I can focus on enjoying myself. And I'm starting really my Next, my next 50 years right now. That's kind of where I'm at now.

I love it.

So in that the biohack that we're talking about is the power plate. And the power plate is the nexus between energy and life, whole body vibration. It runs off Isaac Newton's second law. So force equals mass times acceleration. You remember that from your physics class, where acceleration is what's being increased versus mass. And generally we focus on the mass. Whether we do any kind of strength training, we focus on holding mass or dealing with the mass or changing the mass. With whole body vibration and power plate, you're focusing on the acceleration or the speed change. So if you drop two size weights at the same height at the same time, they hit the ground at the same time because the acceleration is the same for a free falling object, which that's 9.8 meters per second squared. If two people weighing the same perform squats, one does squats on the ground dynamically and one does squats on a power plate. The person on the power plate produces more force. Yeah, and they produce more force.

They do that because what's the plate doing? Like explain the motion and how that works because I think that's fundamental to what this is.

Yeah, it really is. So the power plate generates bottom up training, its subconscious, its harmonic vibration. While conventional exercise or effort, it focus on top down, which is conscious. So you're really changing the formula from conscious effort to subconscious. And as you get into the subconscious, the triplanar movement of the power plate facilitates it. So mechanical vibration oscillates in three directions. On the power plate, it's produced by two motors located under the platform's base. And these are measurable oscillations. The plate goes up and down, it goes side to side and it goes front to back. Two to four millimeters. And there's no other whole body vibration device that generates this, this, this is called multiplanar movement. And it creates an unstable environment. And that's proprioceptively challenging. Basically, the nervous system doesn't know what to do. It says, well, am I under a balance challenge? Am I under a, you know, am I under a hormonal challenge, cardiovascular challenge? And so the result is that this total global activation occurs of most of our systems. And then your central nervous system itself creates an autonomic subconscious response. Super powerful.

I like to explain it as is. Like, you know, you're doing a squat, but your body thinks you're doing 20 or 30 squats because it's constantly adjusting and it knows that your body's going up and down a little bit. So it says, well, clearly something else is going on. I have to adapt to this. And so you just get this rapid adaptation that drives the hormonal changes to get bone density that you're not going to get. If you're just doing squats, you get some amount of it. But doing it on a power plate, you get a different result. And is it just from the body trying to adjust to the, the motion in three dimensions that's causing it?

Yeah, it's multifaceted. The result that comes from the power plate. The same mechanism that the power plate elicits is the reflex, tonic reflex activation that occurs if you go to the doctor, you get your checkup once a year, and they check your reflexes and they actually, they knock just under your knee and your knee reflexively extends. Right. That tonic reflex mechanism is what occurs when you're using the power plate. And so you can experience this phenomenon like, so if you place your hand on your chest and you just lift your index finger up and you just put it back down. Just feel that a few times. Okay, so this is you doing any kind of voluntary movement, exercise, effort. Okay, now take your other hand and lift your index finger up and just let it snap back down and rebound a couple times. You can feel that. That's the power of power plate.

So without any effort, it just does.

Something right, right in this. In the same way, power plate stimulates this neuromuscular spindle without the need for the brain to even get involved. So you're just setting the brain aside. So it's subconscious, it creates, I call it cognitive confidence. The nervous system itself is ramping up safety signals so that the brain is understanding what it needs to do without you consciously having to do anything. It's Brilliant.

You talked about a specific frequency earlier. And what does frequency mean in the context of whole body vibration? Like, what is a frequency? And what does it matter?

Human beings emit about 60 watts of energy. Okay, 60 watts. If we stand up. The human body standing is at about 7.5 Hz. Okay, so 7.83 Hz is the Schumann resonance. You may have heard of the Schumann.

When you say the human body, what are you measuring? You're measuring, like, electricity on the skin. You're measuring magnetic field. Like, what. What's that a measure of?

Yeah, that's a measure of on the skin. The actual skin.

Okay, so an electrical resonance on the skin.

That's right.

Right.

So these frequencies are called the Schumann resonance frequencies. Right. So they belong to a group of natural electromagnetic Earth energies.

It's good EMF from the planet, not the bad EMF from your cell phone.

That's right. That's the stuff we're supposed to be exposed to. They're very important because they induce brain states that help us relax, they help us heal, they help us perceive and experience things on the Earth. So our bodies are literally designed to work this way. And power play, then, is the medium to being earthed. So you can use this on the bottoms of your feet, you can use this on your hands, on your thighs, on your forearms, stomach. For microbiome improvements in hrv.

When you say use this, though, I mean this is a big device. And you're standing on the thing and it moves. So you hold your hand on it. You're saying, sure, yeah.

There's different size of these power plate devices. Right. There's one that goes in the back of a car. There's ones that have towers that stand up. Oh, those ones. Okay. But the platform isn't a drastic balance challenge. That's not safe. It just slightly has a tip. But the.

Yeah, it just kind of vibrates.

But it vibrates.

One thing I've noticed, I have a family member who shall remain nameless. I'm like, look, you need to get a power plate a good quality with the right kind of motion. And it was like, yeah, I found one for $300 on Amazon. And it was a kind that rocked back and forth. And every time I've ever stepped on one of those, I always get massive low back pain, and it wrecks your hips. And I'm like, you need to not do that. Of course, family does what family will do. And eventually he replaced it because it did exactly what I predicted there. So what is it about rocking from one leg? To the other that is not good for people versus the tri planar movement that clearly. I mean, power plate has so much evidence behind it. What, what's the difference between those two?

So there's the teeter totter boards. You're just. Yeah, yeah, those are the ones that are.

Those are horrible.

Yeah, those are pretty much contraindicated. There's some, some good literature work that's been done that shows that potentially the corpus callosum is potentially, you know, influenced negatively from that.

Yeah. The connection between the hemispheres of the brain, you know, that little thing. Right. We don't want that to be. Yeah, okay, got it. So those are just bad news.

Yeah. So you, you, when you're into whole body vibration, you're doing power plate and you're doing it because of. Yeah, because it's harmonic vibration, which off. Which is authentic to the body. And it's that tri planar movement that's predictive so that the brain actually ramps up these safety signals because it understands that it's going to be consistent. It moves either at 2 millimeters of travel, which is the low frequency, or it moves up to 4 millimeters of travel and that's the high frequency. So depending on your goal and depending on what it is you're looking to stimulate, if you're dealing, because you can place this in a bunch of categories, you could be looking at heart rate variability and you're going to be in a low frequency setting. You could be looking to drive growth hormone and testosterone. You're going to be on a high frequency setting. So it just depends on what exactly are you doing. On that note, the total allostatic load. Right. Our total physiologic stresses that we manage environmentally through the world, that process itself, you can improve with whole body vibration and power play because there's a resonance that occurs from using the power plate. That's subconscious. You don't have to focus on it consciously and you start matching your breathing to your heart. And that occurs from only the triplanar vibration device, which is power play.

Interesting. I noticed something else when I started using it. My flexibility. I didn't used to be able to touch my toes. I was not a flexible person other than dislocating a few joints. Not joints, just one joint. My knees always dislocate after an injury. But I was not a flexible person at all in gym class. And I am biologically 38. I mentioned and chronologically add about a dozen years to that, slightly less. So I can not just touch my toes. I can put my Ankles behind my head. And I do think that whole body vibration made a huge difference in flexibility. Of course I eat a lot of collagen. I made it into a billion dollar industry. But how much flexibility comes from whole body vibration in just a normal person who's not a crazy biohacker like me?

It's significant. So there's, there's two paths to the flexibility. There's the reciprocal inhibition, which is a mechanical pathway. We'll go over it. And then there's posture. And that's your somatosensory cortex.

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There's a reciprocal inhibition which is a mechanical pathway. We'll go over it. And then there's posture and that's your somatosensory cortex. That's basically activating disharmonic feet, right? So most people are running around and they don't have even the ability to flex the wrinkle. To stand up, you need 90 degrees of flexion at your ankle just to stand. To run you need 110 degrees. So most people are running around running and they can't even stand. So we end up with this process that really affects us involuntarily, all the way up the chain, right back, neck, shoulders. So with the power plate, because of the reflexive nature of it, you're able to instantly improve your neurology. And so all you have to do is just turn it on and you get the improved flexibility because the mechanics of the inhibition is override, it's overridden. So when you have tightness, it works like this. If you are weak in an area, then your body doesn't let you go there. So if you're trying to lean forward, let's say, to stretch your hamstrings, so the muscles on the front of the body are limited, so they. They have a way to inhibit the muscles on the back of the body to not allow you to go forward because you're not safe, the brain registers that you're not safe. Right. So with power play, because it's subconscious and it immediately goes to the motor cortex, you get the signal that the brain tells the muscles, oh, we were able to go ahead and contract to our. To the need that we were able to do. The brain then go ahead and releases the hamstrings within 15 to 30 seconds, and you're immediately able to go down and touch your toes because it's reflexive. It's that tonic reflex response. So it's brilliant. So you don't have to spend your time stretching. When you talk about stretching, you really got to talk about posture, because posture is why we have tightness. So posture is your eyes, your major sensors, Your eyes, your jaw, and your feet and your skin. So the power play becomes the segue to improve posture, which will equal improved flexibility. So you can do different postural saccade exercises with your eyes while on the power play. So then you're addressing two of your major sensors, you're addressing your feet, and you're addressing your eyes, and that's 75, 80% of your posture. Flexibility then comes as a byproduct of improving posture.

So how much time do you need to spend on a daily basis on a power plate in order to start seeing that kind of a change?

Two minutes.

Two minutes. I would have thought you'd say close to like 5 to 10, 120 seconds.

Because it's. Because it's. Because it's subconscious, because it's reflexive, and because the brain registers safety, it's ramping up. It's a predictive signal that doesn't change. That's why using the rocker or the other types of plates are something that's kind of bad business. You just want to set it aside. So you commit to the power plate. And really, you want the power plate, it should be, you know, one in your kitchen, one in your car, one in the office. And based on how in your car.

Which one is in your car?

There's one called the move, which is basically doesn't have a big platform attached to it. It's smaller, weighs about 75, 80 pounds. But I mean, let's say you're going out to dinner with friends. So you don't have one at the house, it's in the back of your car. So you set it up, you plug it in your car, you step on it and you just stand on it for two minutes. You do two, three minutes on the plate and you've set a pre prandial mechanism before you go in and eat. So now you're influencing blood sugar and all you have to do is stand on the power. Oh yeah. So you don't have to.

By the way, that works. I've done that so many times at home when I use my levels blood glucose monitor. By the way, guys, levels link Dave gives you like a get to the head of the line on that. I do that if I get on my power plate. And like you said, just two minutes, sometimes five minutes before the meal, you can eat a lot more carbs and you don't get the spike at all. I mean it is ridiculous. And it's so much better than doing 10 air squats beforehand. If a girl do is, I'll hold like a chair pose on the power plate for, for as long as I can during that two to five minutes and then you just eat and you're fine. It's better than going for a walk.

It is. Yeah. It's really like, it's an inoculation and you just said it great. You don't have to jump in a cold plunge for 60 seconds. You don't have to do jump, drop down and do 30 seconds of burpees. You just stand on the power play and you're inoculated. So it's really part of the, I call it the fabric of this longevity programming so humans can feel good and look good and function. One of the good stackers with the power plate is with the red light. Yeah, I think that that is one of the key stackers really combined is red light with the whole body vibration of the power plate. And that can be used in a bunch of different facets based on the goal.

So the power plate, what frequency is it running at?

The power plate has low and high frequency. There's 30 to 50 contractions per second that occurs. And you either set it at the low amplitude settings, which is a 2 millimeter of travel or 4 millimeters of travel, and that's the high amplitude settings. It's a simple, you know, shift of a button. Some of them have remotes that you can dial it in. Right. And it's not really more is better. It's depending on Again, what's the goal? What are we looking to do? The humans are, we're designed for frequency and vibration. That's, that's life. So, so the process of setting the power plate is dependent on what it is that's going on. As of 2010, there's been something like 150 to 200 peer reviewed articles annually done in whole body vibration.

I first blogged about whole body vibration at the end of 2010. And people are like, Dave, you're like, you're dumb. And like, literally like people poured so much hate on it. And then 150 studies over the last 12 years. What's your favorite of all the studies that you're like, I told you so, like, what, what was that one?

The first one, 1958 out of the Journal of Aviation Medicine.

So nice. I like this one. Tell me about it.

Yeah. So again, looking at, looking at aviators and the challenges of the anti gravity aspect, looking at bone as well. And so they took these, they took these pilots and they were assessing whole body vibration and then the rate of the change in the altitude shift. And these guys are, you know, they're dropping out of, you know, significant altitudes in, you know, a matter of just a few seconds. And their ability to stay awake because obviously the GS are so huge. Right. So just using whole body vibration, these pilots were able to withstand increased GS, and that's kind of started them on a path towards really breaking open this whole body vibration mechanism. As a research topic.

That's a serious measure of resilience, right? Like, oh yeah, I didn't pass out when I was on the rocket and the other guy did. That's kind of hard to, hard to mess with. My favorite measure though is heart rate variability that if you wake up in the morning, you know, your average heart rate variability throughout the night. That kind of tells you what's my nervous system doing for recovery. Do people see HRV changes when they do power plate?

Yeah, because it's, I, I would say it's free meditation. It's, it's harmonic in nature. So you could go to a Tai Chi class or a meditation class or work in something like yoga. It's conscious. You can make gains. There's a skill acquisition aspect to it. So you have to acquire the skill. So there's a limitation because your, your prefrontal cortex is involved, right? And our first brain is our gut. So when you step on the power plate, your first gut does the work, it takes over and then you're able to actually elicit subconscious changes. This is how we focus on things like nervous system dysregulation, trauma. So people that have nervous system dysregulation in our society, now, it's looked at a little bit. It's a bit of a challenge. We kind of don't know what to do with it. Like, someone says, hey, I just survived this car crash. And sometimes we have judgment on these things. Socially, why weren't you able to handle that? Why is this so special for you? Either way, the person's dysregulation places them in different states. And so there's the dorsal vagal state. That's where people are dysregulated. They're immobilized. They're kind of disconnected from society. Then there's the sympathetic level, right? That's where someone's mobilized. And mobilized doesn't necessarily mean right or wrong or good or bad. And then there's the ventral vagal. And that's where. Where you're safe, you're social, you're connected to others. You can use the power plate to influence vagal tone. That's based on the polyvagal theory.

There's probably been five or six episodes about that, including the father of polyvagal theory, Stephen Porges was on the show quite a while back talking about trauma and the role of the vagal nerve. So longtime listeners are super familiar with it. But if you're new to the show, the vagal nerve is the biggest nerve in the body that controls your autonomic and your fight or flight response and your rest and recover response is this one really big nerve in different parts, but do different things. And that you're saying the power plate manipulates the vagal nerve because it senses vibration throughout the body. Do you have to, like, set it on high frequency or low frequency to get the vagal nerve, or do you have to, like, lean your face against it? I know you're not supposed to do that. Like, how do you intentionally get that vagal tone out of the power plate?

Vagal tone happens automatically, instinctively, and reflexively due to the tonic vibration mechanism from the whole body. Vibration and power plate.

Does it work if you sit on it, like, or do you have to stand?

You ideally can sit, you can stand, you can kneel. It can depend on what your state is. So similar to emotional animals, right? People have different animals to help with emotional tone. The power plate is. This is a nexus to that as well. Because, again, if it's set on low frequency and you're there using it as an autonomic anchor, you will feel what frequency it needs to be on. It won't be something that is an insult to your nervous system. Your nervous system will guide you. And I would say this is where we start to kind of go this way for health, which is trusting our body's intelligence versus externally looking for items in different facets to elicit a health response. So the power play becomes that medium for this. It can be done barefoot. You can have socks on. You're connecting to this resonance and this frequency from vibration.

I tend to do it barefoot or in like zero shoes or something like that, where there's not a lot of packages. Padding, Is that a good thing or should you be wearing, you know, typical running shoe kind of things?

I think it's best that people can move back towards. You know, obviously our goal is to touch the earth, right? We need that frequency from the earth. So because we don't touch the earth as much now, and we sit, which lowers our frequency just by sitting. Those two processes mean when you're using the power plate, you can work yourself towards removing your shoes, removing your socks, because there's a pad as well. Let's say somebody has a peripheral neuropathy and they've got significant pain in the lower extremity. So they may need to keep a shoe on because their pain system, that's their nociception system, the pain system. There's neuropathic pain and there's the neuropathic pain and the nociceptive pain. And so if their nociception, their pain reception is high, yet they're going to want to shoe on just because they have to transition their nervous system from this reaction state to feeling like it's actually, it's in control. So that may take a bit of a process.

I've been doing a lot of work on rehab for my feet and just learning all the micro muscles. There's a lot of complexity there and just more somatic training and things.

So.

And I like to do that on my power plate, right. And it feels like when I'm spreading my toes and learning how to move each of them and I'm doing it while I'm vibrating, that I'm getting some kind of other neurological benefit. Is that all placebo? Is there something going on there? When you're doing functional movement while vibrating.

The somatosensory cortex is what you're describing, and that's what's activated from the feet. It goes up into Brodmann's area in the brain, and that is our is our. It's the master regulator of motor function. So this is where we get to the voluntary exercise, let's say version or corrective exercise versus whole body vibration and power plate. You win every time with power plate because you're addressing the actual nervous system itself and the control mechanism of your motor system. That's how proprioception goes up. So the brain knows where the body is in space and time subconsciously because you're using the power plate. So by default, you win. Your reflexes go up, your IQ improves, your reaction time improves, your ability to propriocept, allows your posture to improve. So now you're breathing better right when we're looking at, when you're looking at this posture process and the feet, if you're able to influence your feet to the brain subconsciously, then you're actually shifting the brain's ability to regulate total homeostatic load. So that's allostatic load. So our allostatic load drops, your stress and strain on your system is less, and all you're doing is activating your feedback beat on the power plate.

Okay, I, I get it. So there is something that's not placebo in, in the results that I feel like I'm getting. One of the other things that I noticed when I started using power plate is I feel like I'm. I get leaner very quickly. But I've had a lifelong problem with toxic mold and with autoimmunity. So I tend to carry a higher inflammation, inflammation burden than the average person. In other words, you give me some wheat and some dairy and some kale or whatever, I'm going to wake up the next morning with muffin top and sore, sore knees probably. But if I use the power plate, then I don't have muffin top when I'm done. There's an interesting study about inflammation and whole body vibration. Can you talk about that? I think that explains why I noticed it.

Yeah. So the, the power plate elicits hormonal changes. It elicits also appetite suppression, and it elicits inhibition of adipogenesis, which means the body's ability to create new fat cells. And so this process occurs because the lymphatic system is activated. Right. So whole body vibration with power plate improves the lymphatic system. So when you improve the lymphatic system, you improve circulation. So as that process goes up. Right. Cardiac output equals heart rate times stroke volume. So you can either improve your heart rate, increase your heart rate, or you can increase stroke volume the amount of times the amount of blood that your heart is pushing through. Power plate does both. It influences heart rate, which has a central nervous system sympathetic side to that activation, and it also improves stroke volume. So as you do that, the circulatory system is activating the lymphatic system, so then inflammation is able to be down regulated.

This is a very noticeable effect. Even in one session, like later that day, you're sort of like looking in the mirror. You know, you're, you're looking and saying, oh, look, you know, I can see now just my abs. I've got a hip there. And it's noticeable. It's quite noticeable. But it's not just in guys. There's an interesting study out there about menopause and power plate. Tell me what they found about whole body vibration and menopause in that study.

Whole body vibration and menopause is looking at hormonal changes as well as microbiome influences. And the process of the tonic vibration mechanism elicits this, this change, this influence in the circulatory, the neuromuscular, the central nervous system, ramping up the nervous system itself as that occurs. Then women are able to make shifts subconsciously without having to endogenously take something. Right? So really the power plate becomes an exogenous stimulus. It's invasive. Without having to actually take something to make those shifts. The power plate promotes, you know, this, this fracture healing aspect because bone is an LED semiconductor, right? So there's an immune system improvement just from using the plate.

And that's what you said, LED semiconductor.

LED semiconductor. Right.

Explain that a little bit more.

So the process of bone runs through Wolf's law. So Wolff's law is mechanical stress, which includes vibration, activates collagen, it deforms collagen, right? So then this piezoelectric effect is what gets occurring, right? And the piezoelectric effect is a biphasic signal. So it uses collagen to direct the signal. And if the signal is positive, it triggers bone absorption. If the signal is negative, it triggers bone growth. So activating the piezoelectric effect allows the bone mechanism to actually be improved. That's how you're seeing those changes in postmenopausal women with power play.

Piezoelectricity simply means that when something moves, it creates, creates a current. Like when you put pressure on it or bend it a little bit, it makes a current. And it turns out our cell membranes are all piezoelectric to a certain extent. And collagen, which is in the cytoplasm, the goop Inside your cells is piezoelectric, which is why your cells are piezoelectric. So people don't understand this, the poor man's much less efficient version. This is rebounding. We've all heard about that from the 70s, and it kind of works. But you have to rebound 50 times a second to get the same effect, which would be kind of hard to do. I can't rebound that fast. I don't know about you, but we don't talk a lot about that electrical effect inside cells, inside the body. But it's fundamental to improving, and it's probably tied to our earlier conversation about when you go up to high altitude, your cells are changing because there's actually a change in pressure. And like you said, you go in and out of high altitude, what happens? There's a piezoelectric effect, as well as a bunch of other things. So I think you nailed something there. When you talk about that. Even with menopause, everything else, you're turning electrical signals on and off in your cells, and you're causing bones to grow, changes in bone, morphogenic protein. And it's kind of very effective for the time it takes to do it.

It is super effective. I mean, this piezoelectric mechanism is. Right. You're saying that it's the way by which exercise stimulates mitochondrial biology. Right. And so that process of making the new energy, the new mitochondria, it's also how your skin processes and stores pressure, heat, light, mechanical, vibration to use energy. So, as you know, there's the piezoelectric, right? Which is the conversion of the pressure and the mechanical into an electric charge. There's the pyroelectric. That's the conversion of heat to an electric charge. And there's the photoelectric, and that's the conversion of light into this electric charge. This all occurs to this PZO generator, which is collagen. So that brings us back to this. Frequency and vibration is that mechanism that's essential to life. So right now, I'm sitting down. Right now, my hertz drops to about four to six hertz. So if I stand up, I move up to about 7.5 to 7.83. So just that standing, seated, shift in our body's ability is why we generally don't want to be seated all day.

When I do a pulse wave analysis to measure my arterial stiffness and I do power play, I want to make that clear. It says, I'm 22 years old, so I have arterial stiffness of, like, just finish my teens And I don't know how much of that comes from eating collagen or from power plate or from doing power plate and eating collagen. What is your opinion on that stupidly low number? I mean, it's less than half my chronological age. My arterial stiffness score.

It's great. The, the process of increasing circulation will directly influence your arterial stiffness. So as you're increasing your, either your stroke volume or your heart rate, circulation goes up. And this increase oxygen to the tissues or this oxygenation increases nitric oxide. So what you're demonstrating sounds like is increased endothelial nitric oxide, which is, which is important for our health because we need our endothelial tissue, that's our critical junction for us to function.

Well.

So combining that with the actual, the collagen mechanism and having that in good supply, that equals the result that you're experiencing.

It'S really cool. It's hard for me to know if it's nitric oxide induced. I don't normally test super high when I use a test strip unless I'm using a lot of my red light therapy devices. Those will raise the number. What I find people don't know about nitric oxide is that there's three flavors of it. There's the kind that we know about that's associated with erections and things like that. We'll call it the recreational form. And the endothelial form, you're talking about Enos. But there's also neural nitric oxide, which can be good for your brain. And then there's inducible nitric oxide, which creates peroxy nitrite, which is one of the most toxic free radicals in the body. That's really bad for cells. You give me beets and beet products. I make almost all inducible. I think it's genetic. And then I just get a headache and want to go to sleep. And it's not a good feeling. Any evidence or any knowledge about creating specifically endothelial nitric oxide from power plate. The good stuff or the brain stuff versus the bad stuff?

Yeah. So the nitric oxide production with the power plate is the endothelial and the neuronal.

Rock on. So you only make the two good ones. You don't make the bad one. But beet extract or whatever can make all three.

Yeah, that's right.

So you don't have to take beet extract. Maybe do put your true lights all around your, all around your power plate. You get some red light therapy that helps with the endothelial and you get the power Plate helps with endothelial. And what do you know? You kind of like your life, right?

Right. So you combine septum breathing with your power plate and you got the trifecta of circulation.

You got harm septum breathing being just tape your mouth, essentially.

You can do that. You can use a functional active, which places the tongue. The jaw is all about the tongue. It's the position of the tongue. It's not the anatomy of the jaw. So you focus on the tongue itself. So when dealing with septum breathing, for a lot of people, just taping the mouth isn't necessarily enough because the tongue.

So what do they need to do? So when you're using the power plate, where does your tongue go? Like walk me through.

The tongue would go to the. To the top roof of the mouth. It's called the spot, which is just back behind the teeth. You're not really touching the teeth, but it's just back behind the top of the mouth.

So it's like one millimeter behind the teeth or like five millimeters behind the teeth.

Just one. One millimeter behind the teeth.

Okay.

And then the jaw itself, that the tmj, people that have tmj, they. It's a brain map. So it's tough for them to be able to handle that. And your teeth are only supposed to touch 12 minutes a day. So when you're on the power plate, it's not going to rattle your teeth. That's those rocker boards. The triplanar movement and the harmonic vibration will allow you to place your tongue in the right position. Then you can drive the nostril septum breathing. Sometimes alternate nostril breathing is needed if the person has the pranayama kind of stuff, because maybe a sinus rinse is required because maybe they're not able. You move something like a liter of sinus fluid every day through your sinuses. It's a massive mechanism that's limited. Right. The mouth is for eating and the nose is for breath breathing. So if you combine the septum breathing, the tongues of the roof of your mouth, and you're on the power plate, you've got what you need. Cardiovascular, hormonal and lymphatic activation. You know, there's a nitric oxide sequence that I've created on the power plate. It takes you three to four minutes. It's great to do at 10am it's good to do at 3pm Kind of the times where we seek out other substances to increase our energy production. You need four or five movements. Each movement takes you 30 seconds. And you can increase your. You're telling your brain it's time to feed, it's time to grow, it's time to breathe. This process happens in just three, four minutes. So that's a great system to, let's say at an office where everyone's running to figure out how to stay awake. At three o' clock we can have the power plate nitric oxide dose where you're focusing on the septum breathing and the power plate's doing the subconscious reflexive tonic work. You go back to your more productive self.

Okay, talk to me about growth hormone and testosterone because you've seen some interesting power plate results from that. What's going on with us?

If you look at power plate from a hormonal standpoint, the high amplitude settings with high frequency with static contractions elicits some of the highest numbers in growth hormone upregulation, upwards of several hundred percent. So you're looking at Olympic level weightlifting type movements, but you're only using reflexive vibration and your body weight and static movements to drive these changes. So it's super accessible and it doesn't require a lot of time. And if it's done consistently, you're actually increasing those growth factors, testosterone and growth hormone.

Anything else that people ought to know about power plate, about whole body vibration, like where it's going or did we hit all the good stuff?

There's so many parts to the power plate story from the post and pre prandial influences to this native energy production, you know, metabolic flexibility aspect, heart rate variability, the autonomic changes, hormonal bone strength improvement. It really is again this nexus to elect energy and life. So I think that we're in this arc now where we're done with, you know, all truth goes through three phases, right? First phase, it's violently opposed. Second phase, it's checking challenged aggressively. And the third is self evident. So with the amount of literature that's there with power Plate, it's the most heavily researched exercise device in the world. It's here, it's time.

You could have made a case a dozen years ago. That's too fringy. Even though there's research going back to 1958 and NASA uses it. But at this point you just have to be kind of a jerk to like, no, that can't work, therefore it doesn't. It just means you haven't used a search engine other than Google to look for something because you can't trust Google to find anything for you anymore. So like there's, there's just abundant evidence like 150 studies. So I, I mean there might be effects we don't know about. Heck, there might even be negative effects. Just to be perfectly honest, I haven't found any. Just don't shake your brain and you lock yourself up and stuff. But this is a powerful, powerful way of saving time. And the whole field of biohacking is like, look, Mother Nature might not be able to get that signal in fast enough for your body to do what you want. So let's use some tech. And this vibration at the right frequency and the right tri planar movement from Power Plate, I think you've earned your spot as a really valid biohack. So thanks for doing the work and thanks for being on the show.

Thank you so much.

If you guys need to Hear the URL one more time, power plate.com Dave and save yourself more about 700 bucks and get another couple hundred dollars in value. So it's, it's a great deal and you'll like how you feel. See you guys on the next episode. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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