What does Electrical Muscle Stimulation do?

electrical muscle stimulation

EMS is a Bio-Hack that uses how the brain talks to muscles. What does Electrical Muscle Stimulation do? Well, we must start by talking about what muscles do…. In everyday life, when we want to move; walk, run, exercise, cough, stretch, reach for our phone – really any movement or muscle action, it starts with a thought or signal from the brain and/or spinal cord.

Warning – the next four sentences contain science!

That thought or command to move from the brain is an electrical signal that travels down the nerves to the muscles. Just as the nerve gets to the muscle, (nerves that connect with muscles are called motor neurons) that terminal point is a connection called the neuromuscular junction. When that electrical signal gets to the neuromuscular junction it jumps across a tiny little gap called a synapse. Then the signal is transmitted along the muscle which then contracts as the brain directs it.

ems is a bio hack that uses how the brain talks to muscles

OK – Science is over…

That is how muscles contract. It’s really an electric signal from your brain that makes muscles work. EMS is a Bio-Hack of this natural principle that uses how the brain talks to muscles. EMS increases the volume a bit to make more muscle fibers respond to the signal to exercise.

So, EMS is not shocking the muscle into a spasm, it is rather using the body’s own signaling pathway of the neuromuscular junction to stimulate the muscle contraction. Electrical Muscle Stimulation is really a nerve connection, not a muscular one. This distinction is important because it takes less power to make nerves fire than it does to directly stimulate muscles, so the electrical current is very, very low and safe.

Not only does EMS use the natural operation of nerve-to-muscle to signal the muscle to contract, EMS intensifies this mechanism to signal deeper muscle layers which are not stimulated during usual training methods, such as lifting weights or any other strengthening systems.

Thus, electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) is simply a selective intensification of electrical stimuli to your muscles. At FITtec.®, we use this sophisticated science to help you train faster to get the results you want quickly and easily. We use Whole Body – Electrical Muscle Stimulation, (WB-EMS), which engages all the large muscle areas of your body. Because of the way EMS involves almost all muscle fibers in exercise, the muscle being worked recruits practically all muscle fibers giving you a better, deeper work out in shorter time periods. In two 20-minute workout sessions you can get the benefit of three 90-minute conventional weight workouts, saving you time and not over-loading your joints.

By - Dr. Richard Garde


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MF Azman and Awazman,
6th International Conference on Mechatronics,
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Effect of whole-body electromyostimulation on energy expenditure during exercise.
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