Long-Term Effect of Whole Body Vibration Training on Jump Height: Meta-analysis

ABSTRACTManimmanakorn, N, Hamlin, MJ, Ross, JJ, and Manimmanakorn, A. Long-term effect of whole body vibration training on jump heightmeta-analysis. J Strength Cond Res 28(6)1739–1750, 2014—Whole body vibration (WBV) is widely promoted as a means of improving muscle strength, but the evidence of a performance benefit is unclear with some reporting improvements and others finding none. The objective of this study was to analyze the current evidence for the effectiveness of WBV on jump height. We included randomized controlled trials or matched design studies comparing the effect of WBV training on countermovement and squat jump (SJ) height, which were gathered from MEDLINE, Web of Knowledge, Sciencedirect, Proquest, Scopus, Google Scholar, and SPORTDiscus databases. The overall effect of WBV training (from the 15 studies included) compared with having no additional exercise on countermovement jump height yielded a positive standardized mean difference of 0.77 (95% confidence interval, 0.55–0.99). The effect of WBV training on SJ height was 0.68 (0.08–1.11). Vibration exercise consisting of a higher frequency (>30 Hz, 0.86, 0.62–1.10), higher amplitude (>3 mm, 0.84, 0.52–1.17), longer exposure duration (>10 minutes per session, 0.92, 0.48–1.36), longer training period (>12 weeks, 0.87, 0.56–1.19) and among nonathletes (0.96, 0.63–1.30) had greater benefit for jump height improvement than a lower frequency (≤30 Hz, 0.56, 0.13–0.99), lower amplitude (≤3 mm, 0.66, 0.35–0.98), shorter exposure duration (≤10 minutes per session, 0.68, 0.45–0.92), intermediate training period (4–12 weeks, 0.72, 0.35–1.09), shorter training period (