by Lloyd Shaw
As anyone in this industry will tell you, this is one of those questions that makes you put your head in your hands and cry when asked. I sometimes wonder if the person is pulling my leg, but to be fair some people cannot correlate everyday experiences into new experiences.
So I answer the question with another question ...” Do you get brain damage from jogging?”
Clearly your head receives far more impact while jogging than remaining static in a correct pose on a vibrating platform where you can’t even see a person’s head move. Even standing lock-legged on a platform, which is the worst pose to directly transfer all energy from the plate into the head, comes nowhere close to what we receive when running.
All other sports involving shocks or contact such as rugby, soccer (think heading a ball ), gymnastics etc… have even greater impacts. Even riding a bike down a rocky road will get you shaken up far harder than anything I have seen in Vibration Training.
You have to look at sports where deliberate high amplitude shocks to the head, such as boxing, to consider getting brain damage. The fact is your body’s own defense mechanism will make you stop any risky activity by “knocking you out” should your brain start being smacked around too much.
Research
The brain is encased in Cerebrospinal fluid that acts as a very good shock absorber against blows to the head and a sudden stop or massive change in direction is needed for your brain to hit the inside on your skull.
The dynamics of this action and the body’s limits have been tested and never greater than by Dr. John Paul Stapp (1910 - 1999). Over a long career with the U.S. army as a Doctor, he volunteered to be a “human decelerator” to test the limits of how the body coped with change of direction in the name of aviation safety. He regularly underwent 25g sudden stops with 1 record breaking 40g stop where he went from the speed of a .45 caliber bullet to a dead stop in 1.4 sec. During these tests he never knocked himself out.
He died in his sleep at age 89 .
In Conclusion
In the cold light of reason and science these types of questions may seem kind of silly, but the fact is we are responsible for introducing people not only to a new form of training but a new experience as well and must continue to remind ourselves that this will bring up fears and concerns we don’t think about because it’s not new to us.
