// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
I Wore an Electrical Muscle Stimulation Body Suit to Zap Myself Into Fitness
The use of electrical muscle stimulation as a shortcut to improving physical fitness was first commercialized sometime in the early 19th century, and while EMS has waxed and waned in popularity over the years, it’s never gone away. Today it is widely used across rehabilitative medical applications but also to boost strength and stamina.
The promise is simple: Stimulate the muscles with pulses of electricity while you’re working out and you can create thousands of muscle contractions in a short amount of time, far more than you can achieve through standard reps. You still have to activate the muscles through flexing and the like—you can’t just lay on the ground and zap your way into shape—but you can accomplish more with a lot less if you’re using EMS as part of your workout.
Studios like Body20 and Manduu now outfit clients with electrodes and pair them with trainers to guide them through EMS sessions. Both companies promise complete body workouts in 20 minutes or less.
The latest spin on EMS is even more appealing: Rather than requiring a studio visit, why not give consumers an EMS suit they can wear at home and use on their own schedule? To that end, German EMS suit maker Pepper offered to let me try out one of its fancy electro-suits to gauge its long-term impact. The company claims that working out while wearing the suit for 20 minutes gives you the equivalent caloric burn and muscle activation of an hour-long traditional workout, all with less strain on the joints.
At least five companies occupy this space at present, ranging from Apeborn’s $4,000 offering to Pepper’s $1,400 suit, which is the cheapest one I’ve found. And even though the idea of getting ripped with minimal effort tickled my lazy bone, it took me a while to come around to the idea of zapping myself on purpose. Could this possibly do any good?
It turns out EMS has been exhaustively studied—dozens of research papers have been published in the past 20 years—and while results vary, researchers seem optimistic on the whole. One 2021 meta-study determined there is “significant evidence for significant, large-sized effects of [whole body]-EMS on muscle mass and strength parameters, but not on body fat mass.” A 2012 study on trained athletes measured the benefits of using EMS for three to six weeks directly: Vertical jump height increased by up to 25 percent, and sprint times got faster by as much as 4.8 percent.
Another meta-analytical study from 2023 offered perhaps the most compelling commentary, concluding that “eight weeks of continuous resistance training combined with daily upper body, lower body, and abdominal EMS training can significantly improve muscle mass and upper body muscle strength performance, as well as significantly reduce body fat percentage in healthy subjects.”
It all sounds promising, yet despite the extensive research into EMS, there’s no general medical consensus about the tech.
I spoke to a half-dozen physicians about EMS for this story, and opinions varied along quite a wide spectrum. At one end, Andrew Mock, a primary care physician in Newport Beach and five-time winner of the California’s Strongest Man competition, lightweight division, said that EMS had proven beneficial for rehab or critical care situations in patients with severe mobility restrictions, but healthy patients were unlikely to see much value. “If you go outside and start shivering, those are muscle contractions,” he says. “But shivering doesn’t make you stronger.”
At the other end, I heard from Ethan Kellum, the team doctor for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans, who said he uses a form of EMS not just for rehab but to supplement his own workouts. “It’s really a function of the nervous system,” he says, noting that in older patients, muscles can become unresponsive and “go to sleep,” requiring significant effort to reawaken them. “When used appropriately, EMS can help improve the efficiency of communication between the nervous system and the body. Add it to what you’r