What is Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS)?
It’s the use of electric impulses to muscle fibers to help with strength training and/or rehabilitation of injured muscles by reproducing the body’s natural contraction of muscles by using electrical impulses.
The body doesn’t know if the muscle contraction is voluntary or involuntary (use of EMS) so you can get an adequate workout while minimizing cardio fatigue and possible injury or stress on joints.
Previously EMS wasn’t widely used; however, recently it’s becoming more popular after research and discovering the effects it can have.
It’s now a commonly used technique to assist in injury prevention, physical preparation and muscle recovery.
How it works
Electrodes are strategically placed to achieve the results in specified muscle areas.
This helps with proper muscle stimulation.
Few highlights of what muscle stimulators can do:
* Can help build muscle strength, density and size
* Reduce injury and fatigue
* Increase localized blood circulation
* Can assist with relaxing muscles and enabling a faster recovery
* Can optimize your muscle’s potential prior to competition or workout.
* Targets muscle fibers
* Increases capillarization of the muscles
* Recover faster
Depending on the level of performance you’ll want to choose the appropriate muscle stimulator.
Make sure to get one that is FDA approved/cleared. Electrical muscle stimulators are considered devices under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Under this law and the agency’s regulations, the FDA is responsible for regulating the sale of all electrical muscle stimulators in the United States. Therefore, firms must comply with appropriate FDA premarket regulatory requirements before they can legally sell their stimulators. Most electrical muscle stimulators (EMS devices) that have been reviewed by FDA are intended for use in physical therapy and rehabilitation under the direction of a health care professional. If a company wants to sell EMS devices directly to consumers, the company needs to show FDA it can be used safely and effectively in that setting. (source: fda.gov)
There are a variety of muscle stimulators available here to pick from that will suit your needs.