Ep. #450: Does Electrical Muscle Stimulation Work? What the Science Actually Says

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men. Thinner, leaner, stronger for women.

My flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. And my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym. The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever.

And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes and Noble stores. Again, that’s bigger, leaner, stronger for men. Thinner, leaner, stronger for women, the shredded chef and the little black book of workout motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audio books, 100 percent free when you sign up for an audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting.

Meal prepping and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www. legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash a U D I B L E. And sign up for your account. Hey, I’m Mike.

This is the muscle for life podcast and welcome. Welcome. Today. We’re going to talk about electrical muscle stimulation. Does this work? And this is something that I’ve been asked about a number of times. Because it sounds cool, what if you could just shock your muscles with some electricity and that would help them grow and develop faster?

What if it would also reduce exercise induced muscle damage and help you recover better and faster from your workouts? And what if it could just straight up make you stronger? These are some of the reasons people buy and use these machines. I’m just going to call them EMS, right? Electro muscle stimulation, EMS machines because they promise stuff like this and many people buy into it.

They think that EMS is an easy and safe way to gain muscle and strength faster. And. Boost post workout recovery. And if you’ve ever looked into it, you might have found yourself wanting to believe as well. And I understand when I first heard about it I was skeptical, but wanted to believe that, Hey, maybe there’s something here because anything us natural weightlifters can do to gain a slight edge in terms of muscle and strength gain or recovery.

Is worth considering if it’s safe and it’s natural, it’s worth considering. And in the case of EMS, the whole approach does sound fairly scientific. And we’ve probably all seen at least one professional athlete hooked up to one of these machines. And so if we take it at face value, we might be ready to plunk down some cash.

That said. On the other hand, some of the scientific studies conducted on EMS are not worth the paper that they are printed on. And some athletes out there, many, let’s be real, will beat the drum for anything that brings in some money. Now, EMS machines are expensive as well, so if they do work, we would have to consider the effect size.

How well do they work? Because they would need to work pretty damn well for the ROI to justify the cost. And when you look at the science objectively, when you take a cold, hard look at the research out there, here is what you learn. EMS isn’t. Silly pseudoscience, as some people say, but it’s also not nearly as great as the machine manufacturers and marketers would have you believe.

Yes, it is safe, but no, it’s not going to dramatically impact your gains, your muscle and strength gain, or Your recovery. That said, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t give EMS a go. You just need to understand why you’re doing it and have the right expectations. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this podcast.

We’re going to break down what EMS is, how it works, and what science has to say about its effectiveness. Let’s start at the top. What is EMS? It’s pretty simple. It’s just what it sounds like. It’s using an electrical current to stimulate your muscles, and this works because your muscles naturally contract in response to electrical signals that are sent by your brain.

So in a way, EMS machines replicate that. These electrical impulses, which then cause muscles to contract on command. Now, does EMS work? The big question. This is where things get gray because while yes, they absolutely cause your muscles to contract, you can play around with the machine and quickly learn that.

Can you use that for anything practical? Let’s talk about that. So let’s go back to the beginning. EMS leapt into the limelight in 1976 when a Soviet scientist named Johan Kotz unveiled research showing that EMS could boost strength in elite level athletes by up to 40%. Percent. As you can imagine, this perked up a lot of years.

And since then, in the decades that have passed, hundreds of studies have been done on EMS. We have a lot of research. And so what that means then is there is a pretty significant body of research that we can weigh to really see what the weight of the evidence is. So let’s go over some of the highlights, some of the issues.

Key takeaways regarding the weight of the evidence, which is the current positions supported by the best research that we have on EMS. So let’s talk about muscle growth. Does EMS increase muscle growth? As weightlifting really at bottom involves just contracting your muscles over and over with varying loads and varying rep ranges and so forth, and your muscles then respond to this by growing bigger and stronger.

If you are doing the most important things, mostly right, the idea that EMS should be able to stimulate some muscle growth too seems reasonable, at least at first glance, because it contracts your muscles over and over. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. No studies to date have found that EMS can boost muscle growth to any significant degree under any conditions or circumstances.

And this actually isn’t that surprising when you consider the physiology of muscle growth. There’s no external load with EMS, of course, which means there’s no way to progressively overload your muscles, which is the primary mechanical driver of EMS. muscle growth, and there’s no range of motion with EMS, which also plays an important role in muscle development.

And so we can keep this one short and sweet and just say that EMS is a very weak stimulus for muscle growth and should not be considered a muscle building technique. Now what about strength? Can you increase your strength with EMS? And the answer is kind of baby. Actually, there are three primary ways to get stronger.

You can increase muscle size, you can increase muscle efficiency, and you can increase movement efficiency. And the first point muscle size is pretty obvious. And there’s a reason why the strongest people in any gym anywhere are generally the biggest people, but the second and third points muscle and movement efficiency are often overlooked.

Now, what do those mean? By muscle efficiency, I’m referring to how thoroughly and how forcefully your body can recruit and contract its muscle fibers. So the more individual muscle fibers in a muscle. that can be activated, the harder and faster those muscles can fire and the more weight they can move.

And this is why muscles can get stronger without getting bigger. That’s very common with newbies. For example, a lot of the strength gains that you make when you first start lifting weights are mostly due to muscle efficiency and movement efficiency. Not muscle size. Of course, you gain muscle, but I’m talking like for your first probably month or two, a lot of the strength gains you make, and this has been demonstrated in research are mostly due to muscle efficiency and movement efficiency.

So what we’re looking at here is muscles can basically learn to work more effectively or be forced to learn to more work more effectively, which then allows you to get more strength and power out of the muscle that you have. Now, what do I mean by movement efficiency? This refers to getting better.

At the exercises and reducing the amount of wasted movement and energy by really drilling in proper form. So for example, there was a time I’m sure when you felt wobbly in your squats and you would shift maybe from side to side, left to to right or forward or back, maybe when you’re going down or when you’re coming up.

And when you do those things, it wastes energy, especially when you have a fair amount of weight on your back and a fair amount of weight just relative to your strength at the time relative to your body weight at the time. However, as you refine. Your technique and really groove in proper movement patterns.

You feel more and more stable and you feel more and more able to transfer the maximum amount of energy into the load, which allows you to lift more weight without having to gain more muscle. It just allows you to get more out of what you’ve got, right? And this is one of the reasons why most strength programs have you do a lot of compound weightlifting and place a lot of emphasis on proper.

Form, and this is just like any physical activity. The more you practice anything that involves moving your body, whether it’s throwing a baseball or doing a squat, the better you get at it. And in the case of the squat, the better you get at it, the more weight you’re going to be able to handle. Now, as far as EMS goes, we are told that it can increase our strength by improving our muscle efficiency.

That is by forcing our muscle fibers to learn to fire more effectively. And just to get into specifics on this, when your brain tells a muscle to contract, many Of the muscles, individual fibers do fire, but in most cases, some are held in reserve, so to speak to take over when the ones initially working get tired out with EMS.

On the other hand, it causes all of the individual fibers in a muscle to contract at once, which is why studies show that it can activate about 30 percent more fibers in a given muscle than if you simply flexed it, of course, just using your brain to. To contract the muscle. And again, that sounds promising.

So the theory that by doing this frequently, you can improve your body’s ability to recruit more muscle fibers when under tension, like when you’re lifting, for example, does make sense. It is a reasonable theory, but how does it pan out? Some studies have found that EMS did indeed produce slight strength gains, and others have found that it made no difference.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the research on this point in particular, how it can impact strength, is flawed for a number of reasons. And this makes it hard to draw any strong conclusions one way or another, so It may help you get a little bit stronger. It may not. Okay. So now let’s talk about muscle recovery.

Can EMS improve muscle recovery? There is evidence that doing a light exercise like walking, for example, is better than just complete rest for recovering from A workout. And this is generally referred to as active recovery. You’ve probably heard of that before. Now, EMS, we are told can accomplish the same thing by using shorter, gentler electrical pulses to mimic leisurely exercise.

And this is a theory that has been disproven. Studies show that EMS does not improve muscle recovery or Reduce muscle soreness. And scientists believe that this is likely due to the fact that EMS does not increase blood flow in the same way as active recovery does, which is one of its key benefits. As far as recovery goes, we know that if you can reliably increase blood flow to muscles that have been trained, yes, that is going to help recovery.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, Would you please help spread the word about it because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. So if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say. Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life, fitness Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. So those are the main benefits promised by these machines. And at this point, You probably have lost interest in EMS altogether.

The machines are expensive and the science says that they’re unlikely to help you in any significant way. You’d be better off just getting some creatine, for example, if you want to gain muscle and strength faster and recover faster. That said, if the price tag doesn’t bother you, and you are just curious if EMS can help you gain strength faster, like it has for some people in some studies, then keep listening, because we’re going to talk about how to do it right.

EMS 101, right? How to give yourself the best chances of success with it. So there are a few rules of thumb. That you should know. The first one is that you want to target one muscle group at a time. EMS machines can only work if they’re focused on one muscle group at a time. So don’t try to hit multiple major muscle groups.

Don’t try to hit your chest and quads and biceps and back all at once. Do them individually. Tip number two is do your limbs one at a time. So if you want to maximally stimulate the muscle group that you’re targeting, then putting the leads on both limbs is just going to dilute the current focus on one limit of time.

Third tip, keep the muscle relaxed in a comfortable position. You want the muscle being worked on to be at complete relaxation. rest with no tension. All the tension should come from the EMS. Fourth tip is do not stimulate antagonistic muscles simultaneously. Now, what does that mean? Most muscles in the body have antagonists.

They have muscles that perform the opposite movements that pull in the other direction, that are relaxed when a muscle is contracted, which makes it the agonist. When you contract a muscle, that’s the agonist. And the antagonist is this other muscle that performs the opposite movement and is relaxed while the agonist is contracted.

So many muscles in the body are paired like this. So for example, the biceps antagonists are The triceps, of course, those are the ones that extend the arm, the biceps flex the arm. And when you’re flexing your biceps and you’re bringing your hand up toward the ceiling, you can feel that your triceps are mostly relaxed.

And then if you flip that around and you extend your arm, so you extend your hand toward the ground. So you’re doing a triceps push down. You can feel that your biceps will be some tension there, but they’re mostly Relaxed. Another example of this is the quads and the hamstrings, the relationship between those two muscles.

They are each other’s antagonists. So back to the tip here, if you are targeting, let’s say your biceps with EMS, do not hit your triceps as well. If you’re doing your quads, do not hit your hamstrings as well. You want to do these muscles separately because the body was designed to work this way. The body was designed to disengage.

These antagonist muscles when the agonists are engaged, because in many cases, if that were not the case, if you could fire both your quads and your hamstrings with a lot of force, for example, you could cause serious damage. I’m not sure if you could break your femur, but maybe I’d have to look into it, but you could really mess your leg up.

That’s for sure. So with EMS, do not stimulate antagonist muscles at the same time. All right. The next tip, the fifth one here is to place the electrode pads properly. And this one is important because if you get it wrong, you are going to hinder or possibly even negate any of the potential benefits. So just follow the machine’s instructions on this.

The sixth and final. Tip is to not skip the warmup. You don’t want to just jump in on a cold muscle with the most powerful current your machine can produce. Instead, you want to start with a warmup protocol, which starts with gentle, usually one second contractions to get the muscle tissue ready for the more powerful stimulations.

And many people also say that taking a hot shower first helps. Them as a pre warmup. And again, the machine should have instructions on how to do this, how to properly warm up your muscles. I just want to let you know to follow those instructions, do not skip them. All right. So that’s it for the one Oh one.

Now let’s talk about how to. actually use EMS to maybe increase your strength. So the first thing you need to know here is the studies that found that EMS can indeed increase strength, had people using EMS in conjunction with resistance training, and they were stimulating muscles that they had trained previously in the day.

So for example, let’s say you trained your upper body. Today. So you did an upper body workout this morning. You could then use EMS in the evening, maybe after work or whatever on your pecs, shoulders, and triceps. If it was a push workout or maybe your back and your biceps, if it was a pull workout or a bit of everything, if it was.

A bit of everything. Now you might be wondering why I said you’d want to wait until the evening or until you got home. If you train in the morning, the reason for that is for best results. You generally want to wait six to eight hours after the training session before you do EMS to just get Give your muscles a little bit of time to partially recover from the workout before they’re further stimulated.

And in terms of a specific EMS protocol, after you’ve done your warmup, stimulate your muscles with six to 10 seconds of hard contractions followed by 50 seconds of rest. And then you repeat that 10 times, and then you cool down in the same way that you warmed up. That’s it. You don’t want to be doing dozens and dozens of contractions in an EMS session.

It’s also worth noting that most people who have reported success with EMS have recommended two to three EMS sessions per week per major muscle group with at least 48 hours in between those sessions on each individual muscle group. So that’s it as far as how to use EMS. It’s pretty simple. And the last little.

Point of housekeeping before we wrap up is a machine. So if you want to do this, you’re probably wondering, all right, what machine should I get? So the company Compex, C O M P E X is generally considered the best option. Their machines are simple. They are reliable. They’re used by a lot of athletes and in many different sports, and they offer a number of different models that range from a couple hundred dollars to a thousand plus.

And the most popular model out there is the cheapest. It’s called the edge. 2. 0 and another company that’s often touted is Globus G L O U B U S. And they have a line called sprint coach. And the downside with these devices is they start at over double the price of the complex machines, but some people do swear by them.

All right. So that’s all I have to say about EMS. It is not what many people say. It is not going to significantly improve your performance or recovery, but it’s not an outright scam either. There is some research that shows it can slightly increase strength if you combine it with regular weightlifting, but it is unlikely to help you gain muscle faster or recover from your workouts faster or better.

One other use that should be mentioned is helping stave off detraining. If you are injured traveling or just can’t get to the gym for whatever reason. So by using EMS, you may be able to maintain your fitness level. better than if you just did nothing. So that’s another option and that’s about it. That’s all we can say about EMS for now.

And I do suspect though, that we will know more in the coming years as more research is done on these machines. Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books, including Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef, and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation.

Inside and outside of the gym, the little black book of workout motivation. Now these books have sold well over one million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play as well as in select Barnes Noble stores.

Again, that’s Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audiobooks 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting.

Meal prepping and cleaning more interesting, entertaining and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on that offer and if you want to get one of my audiobooks for free, go to www. legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash A U D I B L E and sign up for your account.