I'm a bodybuilder. How can a muscle stimulator help?

The "reach" of the muscle stimulator

The body contains roughly 350 striated muscles, which form several larger groups. I will only mention the biggest ones: upper and lower arm, chest, back and spine-supporting muscles, trunk and abdomen, buttocks, thigh and lower leg muscles.

Sport muscle stimulators are suitable for treating one (maximum two) larger muscle groups at a time. You cannot treat the entire body or all major muscle groups simultaneously.

Therefore, the stimulator does not replace or substitute weight training.

An accessory like sports shoes

The stimulator should be considered a technical tool that helps the athlete — in this case the bodybuilder — in preparation, providing extra benefits that cannot be achieved by conventional methods or are not as effective.

You know well the differences between one training machine and another, or how much more comfortable a quality sports outfit or shoe can be. Similarly, the stimulator gives an extra to your training that other tools may not provide.

But just as many people still sweat in plain cotton T-shirts instead of breathable fabrics, not everyone will use a stimulator. No one can do without hard training, but the device gives advantages that a person training only "traditionally" will not get.

Do you remember the first mobile phones, their small screens and the ability to send SMS? You can see how much more a modern phone provides.

The question of without stimulator / with stimulator is exactly like that. Do you stick with the old or follow the newest possibilities? Since few people use basic push-button phones now, most have chosen progress in phones. Why not follow technological innovations in sport?

Whether you use a device is up to you. Because you face different problems in your training than others, you will also differ in why you might need it.

Don't follow fashion; examine what extra benefits it can give you!

Main role: improving training effectiveness

Hard training affects muscles, tendons, ligaments and overall body function. When young, recovery from training load is fast. With work and family responsibilities this becomes much harder. You often arrive at training rushed and immediately attack the weights — for un-warmed muscles and ligaments this is quite a shock.

Overuse tendon injuries are common (tennis elbow, tenosynovitis, Achilles tendon inflammation, plantar fascia inflammation a.k.a. plantar fasciitis, piriformis syndrome, etc.), as are muscle strains. If you don't cool down properly, don't relax or treat the fascia, muscle stiffness will cause problems.

If you train regularly, you know how dangerous an injury is (it can take you out of training for weeks, and months of work can go up in smoke). After age 30 your body no longer regenerates the way it used to.

Muscle stimulators provide huge advances primarily in these areas. On the one hand you get new possibilities that didn't exist before. On the other hand, they offer better results than earlier, low-efficiency methods.

Their main applications can be:

• preparing muscles for load (injury prevention)
• reducing post-workout muscle stiffness (cool-down)
• speeding up metabolite clearance (relieving muscle stiffness)
• focused training on an underdeveloped muscle or muscle group
• sore or injured tissue treatment (inflammation, strain, tear, sprain)
• regaining muscle strength after injury, etc.

Regulation of muscle activity

Your muscles are entirely under brain control. According to the principle described by Henneman, when performing a movement, smaller muscles are recruited before larger ones, and within a muscle bundle the slow (type I) fibers contract first, then the intermediate (type IIa), and finally — if the required force demands it — the super-fast (type IIb) fibers.

By lifting small weights you only "tickle" your type I fibers. These do not add significant "mass", only endurance. If, as an adult man, you curl with a five-kilogram weight, after a while you could perform that exercise even tens of thousands of times, but the circumference of your arm will change by only a few millimeters at most.

Muscle mass is primarily provided by the fast fibers, particularly the type IIb (super-strong) fibers. These, however, are only involved in force production when you need to exert more than about 80% of your maximal capacity. Returning to the previous example: if you can lift 50 kg in one repetition with your biceps (maximal strength), then to significantly increase the size of the biceps you need to work with weights above about 40 kg.

This is why bodybuilders do low-repetition, heavy sets to stimulate growth.

What is it worth using it for?

A bodybuilder should consider purchasing a muscle stimulator if one or more of the following apply and they want a solution.

Warm-up

I already mentioned that muscle mass can be developed with heavy loads. Such high exertion strains the muscles, and even more so the tendons that attach them. Tendons also have poorer blood flow than muscles, so warming them is more difficult.

If you lift heavy without warming up, ligaments and their bone attachment points are overloaded and inflammation can occur. This is painful and prevents correct movement execution, thus interrupting training.

A 15–20 minute muscle stimulation before training can increase blood flow to the muscle and its tendons by 3–8 times. It warms and makes the muscle and tendon more elastic, prepares you for high forces and significantly reduces the risk of injury.

Speeding up muscle recovery

If you haven't used a stimulator yet, first try recovery treatments! Especially after a demanding workout, place the electrodes on the most stressed muscle.

You know that during load metabolites form in the muscle. Their accumulation causes muscle fatigue, stiffness and even pain. The longer they stay in the muscle, the worse these symptoms become. Most metabolites are broken down in the liver, so the sooner they reach the liver, the sooner muscle stiffness and fatigue subside.

The problem is that these metabolites cause vessel dilation, which after exercise slows blood flow and prevents them from leaving.

Numerous studies show that muscle stimulation can increase blood flow in the treated area by up to 300%. This greatly accelerates the pumping out and washing away of waste products from the muscle.

Thus, it reduces the amount of metabolites and, through that, muscle fatigue and stiffness more effectively than other cool-down methods. It's best to treat within 90 minutes after training.

Increased circulation also helps replenish muscle stores. A muscle treated this way will be noticeably fresher and more rested for the next workout, allowing more effective loading.

Developing an "underperforming" muscle

Many experience that, despite training a specific muscle conventionally, it doesn't develop as well as others.

I already mentioned that muscles are regulated automatically neuro-muscularly by size and fiber type. You cannot voluntarily override the size-regulation rule!

This is where the muscle stimulator comes in, allowing you to bypass it! With it you can produce contractions so strong that you cannot voluntarily achieve them — precisely because brain regulation won't allow it.

Different fibers are controlled by motor neurons firing at different speeds. With an impulse of the appropriate frequency range you can recruit type IIb fibers into contraction even without heavy loads! This can be a huge help if a muscle's strength or mass is not developing at the desired rate.

Avoiding setbacks

Imagine a situation: during a strength-focused workout you squat with a barbell and the next day your knee aches. You think, “Oh... it's from yesterday. No matter, I'll push through.” You complete the session. The next day the pain is still there and now it even feels sharp. But you keep training. This goes on for two to three weeks until you realize it is an overuse injury that needs rest. Inflammation will not resolve if you keep loading it.

Yes, but if you skip 2–3 weeks you lose the benefit of the past 3–4 months of hard work and you won't be able to ramp up again this season.

This is where the muscle stimulator helps. While you rest the joint (i.e., avoid the traditional movements that load your knee), stimulation allows you to maintain the condition of your leg muscles! That is: even if you don't work them for weeks, your thigh muscles won't atrophy. As soon as your knee recovers and you return to training, you can practically continue where you left off.

Another similar area is mainly of interest to high-level athletes. Someone preparing for a competition with two workouts per day can have serious problems when traveling to a distant competition. On a 30+ hour flight muscles stiffen, and at that level a two-day break is noticeable. In such cases the muscle stimulator is priceless. It fits in your pocket, can be used on the plane and keeps your most important muscles fully maintained. On arrival there will be no trace of muscle fatigue.

Healing muscle injuries

Muscle stimulation was originally a medical, hospital treatment used for restoring diseased muscles. In case of sports injury it's important for you to return to training as soon as possible.

Muscle stimulation does not move the joint, so you can start muscle-preserving treatments the day after every tendon, ligament, joint capsule or cartilage injury!

After a muscle injury you need to wait a few days for any bleeding to stop. But 3–4 days after the injury you can already use it. It increases blood and lymph circulation, which brings the nutrients necessary for healing to the injured area. This speeds up restoration of the muscle fibers.

Muscle stimulation in practice

In this video I show how simply muscle stimulation can be performed.

Bodybuilder and muscle stimulator

So if you are a bodybuilder, first check whether any of the above applies to you.

If so, I recommend acquiring a muscle stimulator device, because it gives you things you cannot achieve otherwise.