ELECTRICAL MUSCLE STIMULATION

The following information is from the books:
1)Supertraining by Mel Siff and Yuri V. Verkoshansky 1999
2)Science and Practice of Strength Training by Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky 1995
3)Modern Strength and Power Methods Christian Thibaudeau (E-Book)2003?

Electrical muscle stimulation or EMS, has been used extensively by the physical therapy community for many years. My first exposure to EMS was while I was a physical therapy assistant at Hoag Hospital in the early 1990's. It's primary use was for back patients that were either post-operative or attempting to do anything they could to avoid back surgery. I was always interested in this area since one of my old training partners told me about his dad's surgery. His dad had a laminectomy in the early 1980's, and at the time success on this type of surgery was 21%. That sounded like lousy odds! For a historical perspective on this area go to spineonline.com. I would also recommend reading any books by Dr. Stuart McGill a noted orthopedic surgeon. He has outlined logical exercises on back strengthening. I also have to thank Coach Carlisle at USC for showing me more on these exercises. Anyway back to EMS.
In the above case EMS was used for neuromuscular stimulation for pain control or movement patterning (1). The intelligent coach would then say, if it can be used to make someone better who was previously ill, then why can't it be used to make someone better who is already healthy. That application is expressed in some of the other areas that Dr. Siff and Dr. V spoke about in their book (1). Imposition of local physical stress to provoke supercompensation, local restoration after exercise or injury, and general central nervous and endocrine restoration after exercise or injury were the 3 other areas mentioned in their book (1). Local restoration and actual muscle strengthening are the areas that Charlie Francis and Christian Thibaudeau talk about the most. I realize that this is a rarely used in American Sports, but it is interesting that Jerry Rice has been known to use EMS for some time. Not that it will improve his ability to catch the ball, but maybe it has contributed for his relatively injury free and long career. Pages 206-215 cover many studies that review the area of EMS. If you venture to page 219 you can see a device that is used by Jay Schroeder and his athletes in the development of upper body explosiveness. It looks like a Smith machine, but with a larger area to push and receive the force.
In Christian Thibaudeau's book (3) is a chapter dedicated to EMS use. This is layed out in a simpler and easier to understand format. Part 4 of his book is EMS for Sports. He speaks about increased muscle strength, increased muscle mass, increased vertical jump/power, increased running speed, increased recovery and prevention of atrophy, with a fair share of studies. Some of which overlap Dr Z's and Dr V's work. Th unit that CT talks about is Compex Sports US. They are available to individuals in the US, but are presently manafactured outside the US. Go to their website for more info.
The initial exposure to this area was through Dr Z's book (2). A short area of pages 167-169 cover specifics on frquency, modulation and other areas related to EMS. If you have an interset in this area, I highly recommend these books.
I brought this up because I will be doing some experimentation in this area of the next year and hope to share this with my clients and people on my website. This is a debatable area, but with such renowed individuals as the ones I mentioned, I believe this is an area worth investigating. Next week I will be publishing my early results on this years freshman class. This way a coach will have a chance to see some before and afters. Thanks for those questions at acudave@yahoo.com.