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Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) is a fitness protocol that induces muscle contractions using electrical impulses. EMS is growing in popularity each year as it’s an accessible and beneficial form of exercise for nearly everyone.

Clinical research, such as this randomized controlled trial, has verified that EMS is an effective and time-efficient alternative to conventional workouts for people wanting to increase their strength and improve their body composition.

Here are the top 9 benefits of EMS-based workouts.

1. Helps You Lose Weight

EMS is scientifically proven to promote weight loss. EMS helps you lose weight by helping you burn calories and increasing your basal metabolic rate for more than 72 hours. 

Essentially what this means is that after you’re finished with your EMS workout, your body will still be burning more calories than usual, therefore helping you lose more weight. 

2. Improves Athletic Performance

EMS stimulates over 300 muscle fibres simultaneously. 

Activating your muscles helps to break down muscle tissue which is later repaired through rest and proper nutrition. 

Therefore, doing EMS workouts on a regular basis can help improve your muscle tone, strength, speed, and endurance. 

Improving these factors can improve your athletic performance for sports such as basketball or netball.

3. Decreases Stress On Your Joints

EMS is particularly useful if you’re coming off an injury and still want to workout regularly to stay fit. 

Unlike conventional weight training, EMS doesn’t put excessive stress on your joints. 

4. Saves You Time

EMS is very popular because it’s a time-efficient form of exercise because you don’t need to spend 90 minutes in the gym moving from exercise to exercise. 

With EMS, you can spend as little as 20 minutes working out and still improve your cardio and strength. 

5. Fixes Muscular Imbalances

EMS is particularly useful for targeting muscular imbalances. 

With the professional placement of electrodes on specific parts of the body lacking in muscular development, you can fix your muscle imbalances, which can help you improve your posture, and decrease your risk of injury. 

6. Improves Recovery Times

EMS can help to improve recovery times by increasing blood flow, reducing pain, removing lactic acid, releasing endorphins and also promoting muscle relaxation. 

By improving your recovery times, you may be able to workout on a more regular basis without feeling run down.

7. Increases Strength

EMS sends signals to your muscles telling them to contract involuntarily at a higher level than you can achieve by yourself. 

With the ability to contract your muscles at a higher level and for a longer period of time, you’re going to help grow your muscles and increase your strength with less effort.

8. Decreases Muscle Exhaustion

During exercise, your body will use ‘slow-twitch’ muscle fibres first as they are energy efficient. 

Once more power is required, ‘fast-twitch’ muscle fibres kick in to handle the load, but the issue is that these fibres exhaust quickly. 

The body can’t contract all these fibres simultaneously. 

But because of EMS targetting muscles directly, it bypasses energy conversion and can activate all muscles simultaneously, which helps to decrease muscle exhaustion. 

9. Lowers Your Risk Of Injury

In a controlled environment under the supervision of an experienced trainer, EMS is completely safe and has been used successfully for decades. 

The electrical pulses of EMS painlessly stimulate muscle contractions by mimicking the natural electrical activity of the body. 

Since EMS causes muscle activation is higher than normal, there is also no need to use weights or complex equipment, which minimizes the strain on your joints and decreases your risk of injury.

The Bottom Line

EMS is a time-efficient and effective alternative to conventional workouts and is definitely a type of workout that you should try if you’d like to work towards improving your health, losing weight and gaining strength.

You can learn more about the different EMS classes we offer at Exolt by clicking here.