Gabby Windey has revealed she cracked a vertebra while cranking her vibration plate to maximum speed.
The Traitors winner, 35, detailed the fitness-gone-wrong incident in a Substack post published October 2, turning a morning wellness ritual into a cautionary tale about gadget overdrive. Windey, who first gained national attention on The Bachelorette, has built a following for her unfiltered writing voice, and the latest entry delivered exactly that.
She described her typical routine with characteristic bluntness. “Most mornings, I vibrate. On a plate. The cheeks of my ass convulse side to side, like a seizure,” Windey wrote on Substack. She explained she uses the device to mobilize lymph fluid, describing the target as “the turgid and sallow with probable microplastics, from my rotting carcass.”
The trouble started when she pushed the machine past its sensible limits. Windey wrote that she set it to “level 30, supersonic speed,” a setting that proved far more aggressive than her body could handle. “Seemingly, subtly, somewhere on the way to 30, maybe 10 or 20, my vertebrae turn crooked and rub against each other,” she recounted.
The physical aftermath quickly followed. “A small piece breaks off from friction. It catches air. Then it lands softly, too softly, so softly the landing’s in question,” Windey wrote. She added: “It was too fast vibrations I guess, and too many vibrations maybe, and too much pressure to shake. And it broke. Broke right off, like your ex-boyfriend’s bumper. Well, technically, it cracked.”
Windey has since adopted the label “bad backer,” a self-deprecating nod to her new reality. The injury left her grappling with what she called an “insatiable” sensation of tingling and pins and needles, a symptom she struggled to name precisely. She cycled through descriptors in her post, initially calling the feeling “tormenting,” then “tantalizing,” before landing on “titillating” with apparent dark amusement.
“If I had to pick one word to describe this tickle of this nerve, it’s tormenting. No. Maybe tantalizing. No, titillating. Yes, titillating!” Windey wrote. She continued: “This is the greatest sense of condemnation; of persecution, I’ll ever feel. And I do wish it on my worst enemy If only they hadn’t wished it on me first.”
The “ineffable” and “strangest feeling” she described has persisted, turning a recovery story into an ongoing chronicle of nerve irritation.
Vibration plates, which prompt micro-contractions through whole-body oscillation, have maintained popularity in fitness circles for claims around muscle building, balance improvement, and bone density support. Medical literature has long flagged risks alongside benefits. A 2014 study examining device safety found that “vibration is a known to cause both acute and chronic injury to a range of physiologic systems, including musculoskeletal, circulatory and nervous.” The same research warned that “several Whole Body Vibration devices far exceed what is considered safe for even brief exposure to the healthy standing human,” and specifically cautioned use by “the elderly or infirm.” Researchers recommended sticking to equipment meeting ISO-2631 exposure guidelines, standards Windey’s home experiment apparently bypassed entirely.
Windey competed on The Bachelorette in 2022 before winning the second season of Peacock’s The Traitors in 2024.