Electronic muscle stimulation: how Victoria’s Secret Angels pack a two-hour workout into 20 minutes

Mohamed Elzomor has a lot of secrets – 25 of them, and counting. The New York-based personal trainer, who works in upmarket gyms in the city, trains more than 25 Victoria’s Secret models, including Elsa Hosk and Lais Ribeiro, as well as celebrities, company chief executives, and even British politician Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie.

But Elzomor’s biggest secret is his Miha Bodytec electronic muscle stimulation (EMS) machine, which he believes may be the only one of its kind in the United States. The German-made machine, which can improve the effectiveness of a workout by around 70 percentage points, applies electricity to muscle fibres through pads worn on the body during a specially structured set of physical exercises. The electrical impulses cause the muscles to contract.

“The goal of the machine is to activate close to 90 per cent of your muscle fibres,” says Elzomor in an interview at the PE Club gym in Manhattan. “You are getting every bit of your body to work. In a normal workout, you activate 20 to 25 per cent of your body, but using the EMS machine, you activate all your major muscle fibres, including some that have never been turned on before.”

The workout itself is only 20 minutes long, and consists mainly of basic squats, lunges and planks. But with the help of the EMS machine, Elzomor says it’s the equivalent of a two-hour standard workout.

“When you do a normal dumbbell curl, for instance, you bring up the weight bending the elbow. So that gives you just one muscular contraction. But with the EMS machine, you get 85 muscular contractions per second all over your body. So in a sense, it’s 85 times more powerful than doing a normal workout,” he says.