How Rebound Exercise Accomplishes Its Benefits
In jumping on a well-made rebounder, the exerciser usually feels invigorated and filled with a sense of well being. People who rebound find they're able to work longer, sleep better, and feel less tense and nervous. The effect is not just psychological, because the action of bouncing up and down against gravity, without trauma to the muscular/skeletal system, is one of the most beneficial aerobic exercises ever developed.
Rebounding aerobics is working with gravity to cleanse your tissue cells and act as an oxygenator, which, in turn, lightens the load on the heart. Also it's fun to bounce! More importantly, rebounding provides a number of physiological pick-me-ups for the person who sustains this activity for at least ten minutes, four times daily or for a single daily session for 40 minutes. As you bounce, your feet hit the mat with twice the force of gravity. Then just as the astronauts experience while floating in space, your body is in a state of weightlessness at the top of the bounce.
Jumping on the mini-trampoline is remarkably non-strenuous on the joints. There's no solid ground to suddenly stop the bouncing of your feet. Your movements are perfectly safe, and they make the effect of gravity beneficial. By working against constant gravitational pressure while bouncing, you resist the Earth's pull. Your resistance is subtle, but it builds cellular strength. Rebounding's alternating weightlessness and double gravity produce a pumping action, which pulls out waste products from the cells and forces into them oxygen and nutrition from the bloodstream.
Rebounding Benefits the Body in 30 healthful ways:
- Increases the capacity for respiration
- Circulates more oxygen to the tissues
- Establishes a better balance between the oxygen made available and what is required by the tissues
- Causes muscles to work in moving fluids through the body to lighten the heart's load
- Helps to reduce the height to which the arterial pressures rises during exertion
- Lessens the time during which blood pressure remains abnormal after severe activity
- Holds off the incidence of cardiovascular disease
- Increases the functional activity of the red bone marrow in the production of red blood cells
- Aids lymphatic circulation, as well as the flow in the veins of the circulatory system
- Encourages collateral circulation
- Strengthens the heart and other muscles in the body so that they work more efficiently
- Allows the resting heart to beat less often
- Lowers elevated cholesterol and triglyceride levels
- Stimulates the metabolism
- Promotes body growth and repair
- Tones up the glandular system, especially the thyroid to increase its output
- Adds to the alkaline reserve of the body which may be of significance in an emergency requiring prolonged effort
- Chemically attains absolute potential of the cells
- Reserves bodily strength and physical efficiency
- Expands the body's capacity for fuel storage and endurance
- Improves coordination through the transmission of nerve impulses and responsiveness of the muscle fibers
- Affords muscular vigor from increased muscle fiber tone
- Offers relief from neck and back pains, headaches, and other pain caused by lack of exercise
- Enhances digestion and elimination processes
- Allows for better and easier relaxation and sleep
- Results in a better mental performance, with keener learning processes
- Curtails fatigue and menstrual discomfort for women
- Minimizes the number of colds, allergies, digestive disturbances, and abdominal problems
- Helps to slow down aging
- Reduces the likelihood of obesity
The Oxygenating Effect of Jumping
Jumping on a rebounder helps you to attain your heart rate target zone every day that you rebound for the recommended 40 minutes.
Rebound exercise strengthens your heart in two ways: It improves the tone and quality of the muscle itself, and it increases the coordination of the fibers as they wring blood out of the heart during each beat. The aerobic effect while you are rebound-jumping equals and often surpasses that of running.
Your rate of rebounding will vary, depending on how vigorously you bounce and how high you lift your feet off the mat. Rebound exercise offers the ideal aerobic effect with almost any rate of performance, because it fills all the requisites of an oxygenating exercise. Rebounding might be considered a precursor movement for better achieving the oxygen therapies.
The Detoxification Effect of Rebounding
The lymphatic system is the metabolic garbage can of the body. It rids you of toxins such as dead and cancerous cells, nitrogenous wastes, fat, infectious viruses, heavy metals, and other assorted junk cast off by the cells. The movement performed in rebounding provides the stimulus for a free-flowing system that drains away these potential poisons.
Unlike the arterial system, the lymphatic system does not have its own pump. It has no heart muscle to move the fluid around through its lymph vessels. There are just three ways to activate the flow of lymph away from the tissues it serves and back into the main pulmonary circulation.
Lymphatic flow requires muscular contraction from exercise and movement, gravitational pressure, and internal massage to the valves of lymph ducts.
Rebounding supplies all three methods of removing waste products from the cells and from the body. Then arterial blood enters the capillaries in order to furnish the cells with fresh tissue fluid containing food and oxygen. The bouncing motion effectively moves and recycles the lymph and the entire blood supply through the circulatory system many times during the course of the rebounding session.
Rebounding is a lymphatic exercise. As stated earlier, it has the same effect on your body as jumping rope, but without any jarring effect to the ankles, knees, and lower back that comes from hitting the ground. Better than rope jumping, however, the lymphatic channels get put under hydraulic pressure to move fluids containing waste products of metabolism around and out of the body through the left subclavian vein.
Rebounding's Stabilizing Effect on the Nervous System
Bouncing on a rebounder is an excellent method of reducing stress. It can put the bouncing person into a trance-like state and totally relax him or her. Jumping for health and fitness not only stabilizes the nervous system during the exercise period, but continues to help maintain equilibrium after one steps off the device. The result is increased resistance to environmental, physical, emotional, and mental stress.
Rebounding may be enjoyed for a lifetime and adjusted to your own particular level of fitness. It is safe, convenient and inexpensive, and its protective effects against degenerative diseases make it one of the most effective forms of motion in the work place, in recreational pursuits, or in simply exercising for the care of your body and mind.
The Physical Muscular Effect of Rebounding
James White, Ph.D., director of research and rehabilitation in the physical education department at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), has explained how jumping for health offers a true physical strengthening effect to the muscles. He said, "Rebounding allows the muscles to go through the full range of motion at equal force. It helps people learn to shift their weight properly and to be aware of body positions and balance."
An advocate of rebounding for athletic conditioning, Dr. White uses the rebounder in his rehabilitation program at UCSD. "When you jump, jog, and twist on this (jumping) device you can exercise for hours without getting tired. It's great practice for skiing (see Photograph 9), it improves your tennis stroke, and it's a good way to burn off calories and lose weight," said Dr. White (see Table A). "My students tell me it's so much fun that they often exercise on the rebounders for their own enjoyment."
Dr. White added that jumping for health is more effective for fitness and weight loss than cycling, running or jogging, and it has the added advantage of producing fewer injuries.
