I was the biggest sceptic in the room

My first session

11 years agoToday

Eleven years ago my best friend asked me to try an EMS session. His wife had brought the technology into Ireland, and I went along mostly to be polite. I was a gym man. I had been lifting weights for years, and I was quietly sure this was a gimmick.

The truth I was not admitting to anyone, including myself, was that all those years of weights had got me nowhere. I learned from videos and from watching whoever was training beside me. I thought I was invincible. I was not. I hurt myself more times than I care to count.

I brought my ego into the gym with me instead of leaving it at the door.

I did the session, went home and thought little of it. Then, 48 hours later, I felt it: a deep, satisfying ache in muscles that years of barbells had never reached. I remember standing there thinking, what on earth was that? I have been hooked ever since.

If the gym has let you down, you are not the problem

I have watched the same story play out a hundred times. Someone finds the courage to join a gym. Nobody shows them what to do, so they copy the person beside them. They get hurt. They stop going. The eating slips, the confidence goes with it, and they quietly decide that exercise is for other people.

If that is you, hear this: you did not fail. You were left on your own. Here you never are. Every session is one-to-one, with a trainer beside you from the first second to the last, watching every movement and setting every muscle group to suit your body on that day.

Twenty minutes that do the work of ninety

EMS fires your muscles up to 85 times a second while you do simple, controlled movements, and it switches on far more muscle fibres than you can recruit by willpower alone. miha bodytec, who build our system, rate one 20-minute session as the equivalent of around 90 minutes of conventional strength training.

Then your body does the rest. Over the next 48 hours your own proteins repair that muscle and build it back a little stronger. That is the whole secret.

No supplements. No gadgets. No injections. No quick fixes. You come in, you do your 20 minutes once a week, and you get on with your life.

Told to stay away from the gym?

A lot of the people who train with us were told exactly that. Because the impulse does the heavy lifting, there is no bar on your back and no pounding through your joints, which opens the door for people who thought strength training was closed to them:

• Bad backs, old disc problems and sciatica
• Worn or painful knees and hips
• Old shoulder and neck injuries
• Weak core and pelvic floor, including after children
• Desk posture: rounded shoulders and a stiff lower back
• Muscle and strength slipping away with age
• Coming back after illness, surgery or a long lay-off, once you have the all-clear

EMS is exercise, not medical treatment. If your GP or physiotherapist has told you to avoid heavy lifting, talk to them about EMS, then talk to us. We are glad to work alongside their advice.

And if nothing is wrong with you at all, it will still change how you move. Runners find more drive and a steadier stride, because EMS activates more fibres in the glutes, hamstrings and core than running ever asks for. Golfers find more rotation. Gym-goers find strength they could not unlock with weights alone.

Eleven years, and nobody has left empty-handed

We have trained gym-goers and gym-haters, busy parents, shift workers and clients aged 75 and over. There is a programme for every one of them. In all that time I have yet to train a single person who got nothing out of it.

Today we train on the miha bodytec m.ove, the only medically certified EMS system of its kind in Ireland. It is wireless, so there is nothing between you and the movement.

Give me twelve minutes

Your first session is free, and it is only 12 minutes long. Twelve minutes to feel what I felt eleven years ago. Surely you can find twelve minutes.

Gerard
Total Body TEC, Leixlip

The equipment

Every piece of equipment here is the one professionals use: the German-made miha bodytec EMS system, the InBody 270 body composition analyser and, for shockwave therapy, the Swiss EMS DolorClast.