Fat Loss & EMS

- Pedro van Gaalen

If you’ve ever seen one of those low-rent infomercials that punt hand-held electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) devices as an easy, convenient approach to literally shocking your way to less fat, all from the comfort of your couch, then you’d be forgiven for being skeptical.

While there’s certainly no easy way to achieve the body of your dreams, don’t dismiss EMS out of hand. In fact, commercial EMS technology has the potential to drastically reduce the amount of time you need to commit to exercise each week, while delivering results that exceed those many achieve with conventional training. Don’t be fooled, though, you’ll still need to work extremely hard during an EMS training session, but the returns on the time and money you invest can be exponential.

MORE ACTIVATION PER REP

The reason why EMS is so effective is its ability to stimulate involuntary muscle contractions. Depending on the strength of the current and its duration, an EMS machine has the ability to fire all the motor neurons in a targeted muscle simultaneously to create an intense contraction.

These involuntary contractions are very different to the voluntary muscular contractions that we use to move our bodies during exercise. Voluntary contractions are controlled by the brain and tend to undulate through a muscle in a wave to generate a coordinated, directed force. Very seldom, if ever does the brain allow the body to work at or very near its maximum capacity during these types of muscle contractions. This is part of our innate survival response – the brain always tries to keep some energy in reserve and seldom activates our full physiological potential, unless we find ourselves in a life-threatening situation.