The Effects of Resistance Training With and Without Electrical Muscle Stimulation on Body Composition of Obese Women

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Nowadays, total body resistance exercise has been added to instability training and has become popular for improving health and sports performance. Resistance training is a beneficial way to improve body composition and increase muscle strength. This study aims to evaluate the effect of suspension training (total resistance exercises [TRX]) with and without electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) on body composition and muscle strength in obese women. Materials and Methods: This quasi-experimental research is an applied study in terms of research goal. A total of 36 Class 1 obese women (mean±SD age: 30.9±5.3 years, mean±SD body mass: 95.4±9.4 kg, mean±SD height: 168.2±7.8 cm) were randomly selected from qualified volunteers and grouped randomly into three groups (n=12 for each group): EMS, TRX, and TRX-EMS. The TRX group performed 8 weeks of suspension resistance training (3 sessions per week), and the TRX-EMS group performed the TRX exercises wearing a whole-body suit that provided electrical stimulation. EMS intervention includes 3 applications of 90 min/3 days per week for 8 weeks. Data were analyzed by analysis of covariance at a significance level of 0.05 using SPSS software. Results: Findings of this study demonstrate significant differences in body composition measurements among three groups after 8 weeks of interventions (P≤0.05). All three interventions increased muscle strength after 8 weeks. TRX+EMS was the most effective intervention on body composition measures (-4.3% in body mass index [BMI], -7.2% in body fat mass [BFM], and +3.6% in skeletal muscle mass [SMM]) and muscle strength (21.93% in BP-1RM and 27.4% in LP-1RM). Also, these findings may indicate that EMS was the least effective intervention on body composition and muscle strength compared with the TRX and TRX-EMS. Conclusion: According to these results, it is suggested that obese women use EMS with suspension training to lose weight and improve body composition and strength.

Non-Athletic Cohorts Enrolled in Longitudinal Whole-Body Electromyostimulation Trials—An Evidence Map

“…The average training frequency of the B-SES studies was significantly (p < 0.001) higher compared with the WB-EMS studies (4.1 ± 1.7 versus 2.0 ± 0.8 sessions/week). The session length varied between 12 and 20 min [21] and 90 min [17]. Most studies (n = 75) applied WB-EMS or B-SES protocols of 20-30 min (Table 2).…”

“…The majority of studies applied intermittent WB-EMS protocols, predominately with 4-6 s of impulse and 2-4 s of impulse break; only 4 studies provided a consistently continuous impulse during the session [33,42,57,93] (Table 2). At least seventeen studies [17,[20][21][22][23]31,43,44,62,[66][67][68]70,75,77,79,87] worked with variable WB-EMS programs, i.e., they applied varying WB-EMS parameters, predominately including impulse frequency, width, or impulse phase/break, during the session or during the intervention. Apart from a few studies that solely evaluated the effects of low impulse intensity [40,46,57] and one study that applied very high impulse intensity [92], all other WB-EMS studies scheduled moderate to high impulse intensities based on the Borg CR-10 (.…”

“…A large number of studies focused on cohorts with metabolic disorders and diseases. Apart from two studies with sarcopenic obesity cohorts [11,46], ten further studies addressed cohorts with obesity [17,22,23,38,48,74,75,91,96,100]. However, only six studies considered "obesity" as an eligibility criterion [11,22,46,48,74,75] (Song et al [85] described his cohort of female students as "obese"; but due to BMI (26.1 kg/m 2 ) or body fat rate (28% as determined by BIA), this cohort can be considered as overweight only.…”