Electronic Muscle Stimulators?

[Azure]

I was talking to a friend recently and he mentioned the fact that Bruce Lee used a ‘Electronic Muscle Stimulator’ during training to keep his muscles toned. He also mentioned that it improves speed. I have looking into these before but all I really found were a bunch of conflicting articles, from don’t use them because the electronic current it uses can cause cancer to people swearing by them. I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with them? The more seemingly balanced view I found is that they work to some extent with regular exercise, but I hadn’t heard about the speed advantage before. Can anyone comment?

Thanks in advance.

[Wilson]

My therapist used an electronic muscle stimulator when I was trying to get a knee injury under control. Never really asked why but I don't think it had anything to do with muscle strength, more to do with healing the damaged areas. Not a doctor.

As far as using these for training, I haven't heard anything good. Does anyone have any websites or resources where they have any documented proof of whether these are good or bad? I can't imagine they would do anything for you but again....not a doctor.

[yenhoi]

Those types of devices 'work' - they stimulate the muscle to tension with a electronic pulse or whatnot, which does make the muscle work, can cause growth (or damage, however you word it) but I would doubt the whole speed part.

When using one of those devices, you are activating the muscle from an outside 'order' instead of letting the body do the usual neurological thing, so, as far as working your muscle normally, you are probably missing out on alot of little things that you benefit from in other 'normal' workouts.

I doubt they are any more harmful then living underneath telephone wires is............. at any rate, kinesiologilists (sp? ) have been using them longer then the commercial marketplace has had them for sale. Personally I think you should expose your muscles to as many different training stimulus as possible.

[norther practitioner]

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/ems.html

thats what the fda has to say about them.

[Braden]

A muscle is made up of a number of muscle fibers, each of which may vary in a variety of properties. However, each muscle fiber is itself an on-or-off process - it's contracting or it's not. The strength of a given muscle response is proportional to the number of fibers recruited to contract, and also the properties of each such fiber. When a muscle is regularly tense, this is due to a latent level of fiber contraction - a number of fibers being contracted in absence of the requirement for a muscle body response.

In other words - a tense muscle, although associated colloquially with strength, is actually much weaker than a relaxed muscle. Due to the various biophysics of the contractile process as well as the neurophysics of the innervating signal, a tense muscle is also slower to response than a relaxed one.

In other words - you don't want your muscles to be tense all the time, if what you're after is strength and speed.

Exercising doesn't make individual muscles stronger by making them tenser - it makes them stronger by 'teaching' it optimum patterns of fiber recruitment, and by inducing metabolic changes which can cause individual fibers to thicken, which increases their contractile strength. Neither of these is associated with tension.

The act of exercising sends a wide variety of information to your body which is important in this process, beyond simply making your muscles tense.

In other words, simply causing your muscles to tense repeatedly will not have the desired effects you would get from having them 'tense' in addition to the other stimuli they recieve during 'proper' exercise.

Moreover, there's a reasonable number of studies that suggest this kind of isolated tensing can have some undesirable side-effects such as raised blood presure. In addition, it fails to coordinate the movement of the muscle with the conditioning of the bones and ligaments, which is at least as important a process in 'proper' exercise as is the strict muscular processes.

Electronic stimulation is used most commonly in rehabilitation, where muscles are poorly or un- able to generate tension by themselves to induce the kinds of metabolic changes required to repair and grow. Thus, it can be a useful crutch. But it is not a pair of wings.

... or so it seems to me, I hope if I'm wrong someone will correct me.

[Budokan]

That's everything, and more, than I ever wanted to know about muscles.

[HuangKaiVun]

I could imagine it helping if one did it lightly along the meridians, but otherwise I'd be mostly skeptical about this.

How one uses the current is the trick. The body has its own electricity, and one needs to go with the flow. If you don't, I can easily imagine how misdirected meridians from improperly placed electroshock points would result in cancer.

As far as stimulating muscles, there's no need for this. Bruce Lee DEFINITELY did not get faster because of this. The guy was just genetically quick and lean, that's all.

[IronFist]

They are useless for regular training people. If they were good, don't you think pro bodybuilders would use them if they caused hypertrophy? Or pro powerlifters would use them if they caused strength? Or runners would use them if they caused endurance?

Exactly.

IronFist