The Most Dangerous Part of a Fall Happens Before You Hit the Ground. (How To Train To Prevent A Fall)

There is a moment, usually lasting considerably less than a second, when your foot catches the edge of a curb and your body has to make a decision.

Most of us don’t think much about this moment until the decision starts going badly.

Your foot lands somewhere your brain wasn’t expecting. Your center of gravity shifts. Your nervous system detects the problem and starts issuing instructions.

Muscles contract. Other muscles release. Your ankle moves, your hip adjusts, your arms come out and, if everything happens quickly enough, you catch yourself and keep walking.

You might be embarrassed. But you’re still walking.

We tend to think of falling as a strength problem, which it certainly can be. Stronger legs are generally better than weaker ones. But strength is only useful if your body can deploy it in time.

==>> A stumble is, among other things, a reaction-time problem.

And this leads to something interesting about Power Plate that tends to get lost in the usual discussion of vibration.

The important part isn’t really the stimulus. It’s the response.

Consider a major-league baseball player facing a 95-mile-an-hour fastball.

There isn’t enough time for conscious thought to run the operation. He doesn’t see the pitch, conduct a brief meeting with his quadriceps and obliques, and then authorize a swing.

The information arrives and the body responds.

A crack in the sidewalk is obviously not a fastball. But the underlying machinery has something in common: sensory information comes in, the nervous system interprets it and the body has to organize an appropriate movement very quickly.

This is one reason professional sports became an early home for Power Plate.

And it also helps explain why the technology becomes increasingly interesting as we get older.

Your body doesn’t live in an up-and-down world. Human beings move through three dimensions. Actually directions, because most of us don't know what a dimension is!

Forward and backward. Side to side. Up and down. Usually some untidy combination of all three.

Power Plate’s PrecisionWave technology creates very small movements in all three directions simultaneously.

This sounds like an engineering detail. It isn’t.

Many inexpensive vibration machines produce a much simpler movement. Some move primarily vertically. Others pivot around a central point, producing the familiar side-to-side motion of a teeter-totter.

There can certainly be benefits to vibration delivered this way.

==>> But mechanically, it isn’t the same stimulus. And critically the response is nowhere nesr the same.

Power Plate is asking the body to deal with movement coming from three directions at once.

And the body responds, automatically. 

Sensory receptors in muscles and joints detect tiny changes in length, tension and position. Signals travel through the nervous system. Muscles contract reflexively to maintain position and stabilize joints.

Then the platform moves again.

And the body responds again.

This can happen dozens of times every second.

The person standing on the machine may not appear to be doing very much.

Inside the body, quite a lot is going on.

There is a wonderful word for part of this process: proprioception.

It is essentially your brain’s knowledge of where your body is.

Close your eyes and touch your nose. You don’t need to see your finger traveling toward your face because your nervous system maintains a remarkably detailed running map of where the pieces of you are located.

That map matters when you play tennis.

It matters when you ski.

It matters when you step off a curb.

And it matters enormously when the ground suddenly isn’t where you thought it was.

The body, unfortunately, is an efficiency fanatic. It has little interest in maintaining expensive biological capacity simply because you might someday find it useful. Muscle that isn’t sufficiently challenged disappears. Movement patterns become less practiced. Systems adapt to what we repeatedly ask them to do.

This is why simply activating the body becomes interesting.

You don’t necessarily need to exhaust a muscle every time you use it. Sometimes there is considerable value in reminding the nervous system that the muscle is still part of the team.

Power Plate does this in a peculiar way because the floor itself has become the stimulus.

And then you move.

This is where the three-dimensional aspect becomes even more interesting.

Bend your knees and the forces travel through the body differently. Shift your weight and they change again. Raise a heel. Turn your hips. Squat. Lunge. Put your hands on the platform.

The geometry keeps changing.

So does the neuromuscular problem your body is being asked to solve.

This is a much more useful way to understand Power Plate than the phrase “vibration training,” which makes a rather sophisticated interaction between mechanical forces and human physiology sound like something you bought from an infomercial at two in the morning.

A $400 vibration plate can shake you.

Fair enough.

The research suggests that vibration itself can have useful physiological effects, and there is legitimate science around whole-body vibration and muscle activation, balance, circulation, mobility and bone.

But all vibration isn’t the same, for the same reason that all exercise isn’t the same.

Frequency matters. Amplitude matters. Direction matters. Body position matters. Duration matters.

And the mechanical signal matters.

Power Plate’s particular proposition is high-frequency, low-amplitude movement delivered in three dimensions.

Once you understand that, a surprisingly large collection of Power Plate benefits begins to look less like a random list.

Muscle activation isn’t separate from the nervous system.

Balance isn’t separate from proprioception.

Proprioception isn’t separate from reaction.

Reaction isn’t separate from stability.

And stability isn’t separate from our ability to move confidently through the world.

Even the research into circulation and bone begins with the same basic event:

the body receives a mechanical stimulus and responds to it.

This is also why I think comparing Power Plate with a cheap shaking machine misses the interesting question.

The question isn’t: Does it vibrate? The question is:

What kind of information are you giving the body?

For an elite athlete, the answer might ultimately show up as a faster first step, better stabilization or the ability to react to a ball traveling 95 miles an hour.

For a 75-year-old walking across a parking lot, success might be considerably less glamorous.

A shoe catches something.

The body notices.

The right muscles fire.

A foot moves.

Balance returns.

And something that could have become a fall becomes nothing more than another step.

==>> One person calls that performance. Another calls it independence.

The nervous system doesn’t know the difference.