New mum Coleen Rooney will be using Vibration training - but is it just another fad?

Posted: 10/11/2009 at 11:17pm by Rich Leigh, founder of Fat Free Fitness

Coleen Rooney, England footballer Wayne Rooney's wife, is apparently using the newest in fitness techniques in her bid to trim back down to a size 10 having just given birth to son Kai.

This product is the Flexi-bar, a flexible bar which vibrates whilst you exercise holding it.

In no less than 4 instances is the product named in an article on the Daily Mail website, and will no doubt feature in other media coverage too. The Flexi-bar is also personally endorsed by her trainer Eloise Lindsay, who says that she'll be using it in Coleen's exercise programme.

Now, I've been a long-term skeptic of products which claim to be the 'future of fitness', as I truly believe they prey on people who will do just about anything and pay just about any amount in order to lose weight. Vibration training, which many gyms make members pay extra for, is, in my opinion another in a long-line of 'innovations' which fits this bill. The fact that the first I've heard of the Flexi-bar as a trainer is in a story related to a celebrity's weight loss effort leads me to question the effectiveness of the product itself - it certainly wouldn't be the first time somebody in the public eye had endorsed a product as part of a marketing effort, and it won't be the last.

Vibration training claims to push and pull the muscles out of equilibrium, causing signals to be passed continuously from the muscles to the brain and back again, via the nervous system. These signals then tell the muscles they are being pushed away from their centre and that they must automatically contract to bring themselves back, a process known as a Tonic Reflex.

Even if the above is true, which I am not in a scientific position to judge (it does sound plausible), the claims that this type of training can demonstrably affect 'weight loss and muscular strength', as the Flexi-bar claims to do, are laughable, given that we'd be talking about small, barely noticeable muscular movements, the likes of which would require a notional amount of calories to complete.

Angelique Kronebusch, a personal trainer from British Columbia, Canada also believes the Flexi-bar is another in the long list of fitness fads:

"I think [vibration training and the Flexi-bar] is a fad for sure. I worked in a gym with vibration plates, which members paid $100/month to use."

Angelique continued,

"In all the time certain members used them, I never saw these people have any real results."

Ben Poss, also a personal trainer from Vancouver, Canada, was equally vocal,

"I personally think vibration training is a joke. I watched the flexi-bar commercial recently and thought it was hilarious. It blows me away that people still fall for these gimmicks!"