Over the past three years and more I’ve seen myself as a strong proponent for Vibration Training. I’ve become a “champion of the cause”, presenting this method of fitness training to everyone who would listen both in my regular life and on internet websites. I’ve engaged people into conversation merely because they sat next to me in a bus or aircraft. I’ve believed that Vibration Training is for almost everyone, either on it’s own or as part of a wider exercise program and while I know Vibra-Train is Number One, the Vibration Training Specialists, I also felt ties to some of the other companies, whose machines I had tried and found beneficial and who took part in the online community and education of consumers.

This identification with other brands has come to an end.

I’ve had to rethink my hopes for a vibration training industry of various brands involving like minded people whose first aim is to benefit the consumer and secondly, to make a reasonable return on their investment of money and their time. I’m an employee of Vibra-Train and as much as I love my present job I’ve dreamed of owning my own studio or managing one if I couldn’t finance my own. It was always unlikely that I would move away from the Vibra-Train brand but I’d remained open-minded to that possibility as long as the studio had good quality machines and followed the Vibra-Train Safety Program.   My boss, Lloyd Shaw had encouraged me at times to look at other businesses and assured me of help in being sucessful. This was before I began full employment with Vibra-Train but even since he’s talked of sending me to other branded studios to help them and teach them the Vibra-Train Safety Program so that consumers would get good results.

I’d believed that competition of brands within the industry was healthy and in some cases, for example, High Energy Lineal and Premium Speed Pivotal, that the way the machines work is completely different and so draws a different set of users. Now I’m feeling so disappointed at the other brands within the Vibration Training Industry that I’m forced to change my mind about supporting others.

This industry has been let down by almost all brand owners, by their unscrupulous behaviour; their greed and self-serving attitudes; the lack of support of the studios with their brand of machines, such as constant breakdowns of machines that should never have been supplied with inherent faults in design; same with home machines, so many break down or don’t perform as they should and this alone gives the industry a bad name.  Brand Loyalty (and snobbery)  has been such that people wont even admit when they have a problem and ask others for help.

Over the past two years I’ve seen a decline in the “as-seen-on-tv ” cheap and basically useless machines and was encouraged to see the owners of some of  the “better” brands and studio owners start to engage more in social media and in education of the consumer via internet websites and forums.  Those within the industry know that our previous consumer website and forum system had serious problems from within the industry and a new one www-vibration-training-advice was set up.  I hoped for lots of different brands involvement but there’s been very little.

The decisive factor in my pulling away from other brands is a feeling of such disappointment.  The ” final straw”, to use a local idiom, was discovering that the HyperVibe brand was engaging the services of Internet Search Engine Optimization developers, working out of India, writing articles in poor English, some almost unintelligable, for one reason alone – to push that company, HyperVibe’s, Google ranking up to Page 1.  I know a lot about SEO as I have my own website and I do all I can to ethically increase the ranking of others that I am involved with.  I’ve also worked for a large U.S. online directory and still maintain some pages for them.  At times I’ve “cleaned up” articles that were ambiguous due to poor language skills.

The problem with engaging SEO developers that have poor English language skills and zero interest in your industry is that the resulting articles that pop up all over the internet can have very poor quality content.  In this case they have been written by one person using three (at least) different names on the same articles.  It’s clever and it does work to push the linked company, in this case, HyperVibe, up the Search Engine rankings but at what cost?  When I emailed Murray Seaton, the Australian owner/director of HyperVibe, his reply was, “Many of our distributors (ourselves included) use the services of Indian SEO developers”. He said that he was doing all he could to ensure his company ranked highly on the internet so people could read “decent” information rather than that put out by the cheap, low quality home vibration machine suppliers.  With that I agree but he also added, “It’s also my opinion the articles are both harmless and useless to anyone who reads them, its unlikely anyone would be influenced by them (if somehow they manage to find them). They serve no purpose but to help our rankings”.

I have a high personal integrity that, if I had a brand, would not let me promote articles that are “harmless and useless”.  Actually I consider them quite harmful!  It really doesn’t take much more than a simple search using the words “Vibration Training” to find them and they present Vibration Training in a confusing, garbled manner. The articles do not differentiate machine types and present snippets of “facts and figures” taken from other places around the internet that don’t necessarily relate to the actual article or brand of machine they link to.  HyperVibe was a vibration system that I saw as valid, just very different to the Vibra-Train machines I work with.  It’s an excersise system using pivotal vibration, or vibration therapy.  I may have even suggested it to some people but no more.

The future of this industry is Vibra-Train.  Vibration Training is Vibra-Train and Vibra-Train is Vibration Training.

Once again I’m happy to say that I am privileged to work for this company, Vibra-Train -  The Vibration Training Specialists.