Why isn't strapping electrodes to your muscles and forcing them to fully contract just as effective if not better than lifting weights?
You could get full activation every time, on demand. White, red, slow, fast, all fibers at once at their maximum capacity.
Mike Mentzer says they work in one of his books but I think it's the lack of mechanical tension. It's like if you could manage to flex your bicep really hard while posing that it uses 100% of the muscle fibers. Yeah, it's working all of them but it's not "doing" anything.
It's like the limitation of emg studies. They show a muscle activating but they're independent of load. Stepping up a stair causes higher EMG readings for the quads than squatting 400lbs, but the 400lb squatter is going to have bigger legs.
So just add a load and ramp up the voltage. Sit someone in a leg extension machine and zap their triceps like they did to make dead frogs jump in the 18th century.
*quadriceps, obviously
In that book he said that Nautilus was experimenting with it and that was back in the 80s so I guess they never found anything practical about it. Also it's not feasible to even set up an electrode "routine" in the first place
Rocky IV was 1985 and it is implied that Ivan Drago was using electricity to train or at least that's how I always interpreted some of the shots (maybe not this one, there's several where he wears them).
Have you ever tried one of these? They don't actually make the muscle contract any more than putting a 9-volt battery to your tongue makes it curl up.
Yeah nothing's stopping you Op, you go ahead and do that
Muscle growth without proportionate cardiovascular activity seems dangerous.
put one extra electrode in your heart
Because it doesn't train CNS.
Pick up a rubber band really quickly and no matter how fast you pull it upwards it won’t break
Now if you attach rubber band to other end of big rock then if you pull really fast you may tear that rubber band.
The weight itself provides a reaction( think statics/dynamics of engineering or physics student) as if it is a joint/point and provides the resistance needed to tear the muscle so it can be built.
Adding to this you can solve this problem and make it more viable by simply fixing the other end to some rigid object.
Say you place electrode to bicep, you’d want the hand to be grabbing into something immobile, this provides a reaction as needed and you simply control power output so as to only tear enough muscle equal to a good workout.
How about using it while you lift (maybe not free weights in case it messes your balance). Helping you involve every fiber. Both bodybuilders and powerlifters talk a lot about achieving just that, with drop sets, speed sets, those sets that go on until you can't even move your limbs without any weight on the machine.
It's the muscle damage that causes a lot of the growth. Contraction alone doesn't tear fibers in a way that makes them grow effectively
my physiotherapist did this today to my chest muscle (i ACK'ed part of it last week)
feels kinda weird
i will not tase myself to make gains you sick frick
Disregarding the actual muscle and it's contractions since other anons covered it, there are more facets of strength that are not trained this way.
High resistance training will increase your so called neuro-muscular strength meaning that the nerve pathways from the brain to the muscle will have an increase in the surrounding lipids (fats). This basically decreases the resistance for electrical currents. After months of training you will experience that it becomes easier and faster to contract the muscle and that you can contract it 'tighter' than before.
Moreover, the reason compound exercises are the most effective at increasing both strength and muscle mass is that the brain is not that exact at sending out signals. There's always leakage to adjacent muscle groups, meaning that if you contract one muscle along with all it's surrounding muscle groups it will receive a larger current, thus tighter contraction and more strength, compared to if you try to isolate the muscle and not contract anything else. For example : (weighted) chin-ups will always be more effective at increasing bicep strength than bicep curls since you contract all surrounding muscles as well - resulting in a tighter contraction during the chin-up.