The Lowdown on an EMS Workout

What you need to know

Electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) workout: A new form of a full-body workout that is transforming the world of fitness. It’s all about super charging the natural effects of exercise.

How does electrical muscle stimulation work?

In everyday life, your body stimulates muscles naturally by sending bio-electrical pulses down the spinal cord and into your nerve fibers. Muscles need this stimulation in order to move.

EMS is nothing more than an amplification of the body’s own electrical pulses. The extra stimuli cause your muscles to contract more and work harder.

Combining EMS with exercise is a very targeted way of super charging the effects of your workout. Deep muscles are stimulated far more effectively than through conventional exercise alone, making every move stronger and delivering visible improvements more quickly.

The science behind EMS

We all have two types of skeletal muscle fibers, slow-twitch and fast-twitch. Understanding how each of these works is the key to ensuring a workout that will truly get results.

  • Slow-twitch muscle fibers support endurance activities like walking, swimming, and cycling. These fibers are always stimulated first during exercise. They contract slowly so they can keep moving for a long time without getting tired.
  • Fast-twitch muscle fibers support quick, powerful movements, like jumping or sprinting. They contract quickly, consume a lot of energy (in other words they burn fat!), and deliver the strength and power you need to spring into action.

To improve your overall strength, fitness, and body tone; it’s important to flex both types of muscle fibers. EMS specifically targets those harder to reach fast-twitch fibers, boosting the effects of your workout.

A full-body workout

During an EMS workout session at Bodystreet, we can configure a wide range of workout parameters to suit your individual needs. However, an important difference to other forms of exercise is that we are able to activate ALL of the muscle groups simultaneously. This makes a Bodystreet workout much more time-efficient than conventional strength training or gym sessions, which typically only work a few muscle groups at a time.

An EMS workout also has a quick and deep-acting tightening effect on all the core muscle groups. That means you can achieve the same strengthening of low-lying muscle fibers, that we’d normally associate with Yoga or Pilates exercises, without any of the time-consuming holding moves (e.g., plank).

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