Increase Your Muscle Mass Boost By 26% (No Extra Effort, No Supplements)

You’ve probably seen this technology advertised, but the trick is in how it’s used (which is not how most people use it).

It’s about neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), also called electrical muscle stimulation (EMS); in other words, those squid-like electrode kits that promise “six-pack abs without exercise”, by stimulating the muscles for you—using the exact same tech as for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), for pain relief.

Do they work for pain relief? Yes, for many people in any case. But that’s beyond the scope of today’s article.

Do they work for building muscles as advertised? No. The limiting factor is that they can’t fully exert the muscles in the same way actual exercise can, because of the limitations to how much electrical current can safely be applied.

However…

The cyborgization of your regular workout

A meta-analysis of 13 studies compared two [meta-]groups of exercisers:

• Group 1 doing conventional resistance training
• Group 2 doing the same resistance training, plus NMES at the same time (specifically: NMES of the same muscles being used in the workout)

The analysis had two output variables: strength and muscle mass

What they found: group 2 enjoyed more than 31% greater strength gains, and 26% greater muscle mass gains, from the same training over the same period of time.

Of course, one of the biggest challenges to strength gain and muscle mass gain is hitting a plateau, so it’s worth noting that when they looked at training periods ranging from 2 weeks to 16 weeks, longer durations yielded better results—it is, it seems, the gift that keeps on giving.

You can find the paper here (which also explains how they analysed data from 13 different studies to get one coherent set of results):

The additive effect of neuromuscular electrical stimulation and resistance training on muscle mass and strength

How it works and why it matters

While the paper itself does not go into how it works, a reasonable hypothesis is that it works by “confusing” the muscles—because they are receiving mixed signals (one set from your brain, one set from the electrodes), with fast- and slow-twitch muscle fibers both working at the same time.

Another way to “confuse” the muscles is by High Intensity [Interval] Resistance Training (HIRT)—which is basically High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), but for resistance training specifically.

See: How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) and HIIT, But Make It HIRT

Now, we want to confuse our muscles, not our readers, so if that’s all too much to juggle at once, just pick one and go with it. But today’s article is about the RT+NEMS combination, so perhaps you’ll pick that.

Why it matters: as we get older, sarcopenia (the loss of muscle mass) becomes more of an issue, and even if we’re not inclined to a career in bodybuilding, we do still need to at least maintain a healthy muscle mass because:

• Strong muscles improve our stability and make us less likely to fall
• Strong muscles force the body to build strong bones to hold them on, which means lower risk of fractures or worse
• Muscle mass itself improves the body’s basal metabolic rate, which means systemic benefits to the whole body (including against metabolic diseases especially)

See also: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older)

Want to try it?

If you don’t already have a NMES/EMS/TENS kit lying around the house, here’s an example product on Amazon—remember to use it simultaneously with your regular resistance training workout, on the same muscles at the same time, to get the benefit we talked about! 😎

Enjoy!