The fitness trend taking over Toronto
Caitlin Kenny suits up to try ultra-buzzy electric muscle stimulation
A scroll through my Instagram feed makes my obsession clear. Between the ubiquitous selfies and flat lays, most posts are one-minute exercise clips from the dozens of studios and trainers I feverishly follow. It’s the same reason why, at present count, I have class packages at five different studios. I love discovering new workouts — and when I first learned that electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) had landed in Toronto, I couldn’t wait to check it out.
With early adopters/Instagram-posting enthusiasts that include Olympic champion sprinter Usain Bolt and Victoria’s Secret model Alessandra Ambrosio, EMS is one of the hottest trends in fitness. The workout itself is short and simple: a 20-minute body-weight workout — except you’re hooked up to a machine that sends low-frequency currents through your body. The promise is that, by stimulating more muscles than you naturally would, you wind up with an ultra-effective workout. In a single EMS session at GoGo Muscle Training, Yorkville’s newest boutique gym, the average adult burns 600 calories, plus an additional 400 in the 48 hours that follow from the extended metabolism spike. Muscle gain, fat loss and an increased metabolic rate are all purported benefits.
The research, however, is somewhat scattered. Of five studies between 2010 and 2017, four found that EMS helped athletes, including female gymnasts and male soccer players, improve performance and strength, while one turned up no differences between the control and EMS group. In terms of esthetic changes, research is lacking for the general population, though two studies in elderly obese women linked long-term EMS training to reductions in waist circumference and abdominal fat.
Scholarly papers aside, I wanted to see what EMS can do for me. One morning earlier this spring, I found myself at GoGo wearing a wholly unflattering suit: a bulky vest of electrodes, Velcro and wires, complete with arm and leg pieces strapped tightly enough to give my upper thighs the look of a rolled sleeping bag refusing to squeeze back into its nylon sack.
Three days a week (the maximum frequency of EMS training so that muscles have time to recover between sessions), I sipped Nespresso in the small, polished studio, then changed into the unfortunate black cotton-spandex underlayer and stood with my arms and legs wide while — more unfortunate still — my trainer, GoGo co-founder Ali Mirkhan, sprayed me with water, a necessary step so the currents can flow through to my body. Once I was strapped snuggly into the vest, Mirkhan dialed up the frequency on his touch-screen controls, which were displayed for me in the mirror’s fancy built-in screen.
The 20 minutes started and I performed planks, squats, V-sits, mountain climbers, unweighted bicep curls, and more while the machine sent pins-andneedles through my body for short intervals of six seconds on, four seconds off. For my first couple of appointments, it was a breeze, but as I got used to the feeling, we increased the intensity. I regularly asked Mirkhan to “turn it up in my butt,” when the exertion had me at a troubling loss for words.
The more we cranked it, the harder and sweatier things got, and the more sore I felt in the following days. It was that heavy, weak feeling you get in your glutes and quads after a really good leg day, but it was in my whole body — something I imagined would take hours and an impossible amount of energy to achieve at a conventional gym.
That efficiency was one of my favourite draws. It’s hard to come up with a valid excuse to skip such a short workout, and with the monthly membership fee of $499, bailing was that much less justifiable. The other advantage is that I was working out three times a week with zero signs of the chronic injuries that usually slow me down. It makes sense: this technology is an adaptation of the same tingly machine physiotherapists use, plus, the low-impact moves show mercy to my runner’s knees and hips.
But the real test came the morning of my 12th session, when it was time to measure my body composition. My stomach dropped when I saw that I’d gained 2.5 pounds. I tried to remind myself how GoGo’s other co-founder Mani Khajehnouri called weight loss “just a talking point” during our first weigh-in, explaining that he considers percentage body fat and skeletal muscle mass to be more significant. Thankfully, on those scores, my results were great: I had lost fat, and was up 1.3 pounds of muscle and1.8 pounds of its corresponding water.
I was most delighted to see that both arms were showing more muscle mass, with a 3-per-cent increase on the left, bringing it much closer to my dominant side. The stats on the printout looked great, but my newly firm triceps felt even better. When, that weekend, one of my friends suddenly told me, “Whoa, your butt looks really good,” I decided it was well worth every “turn it up in the butt.”