EMS Training Helped University Footballers Get Stronger and Faster in Eight Weeks

A new study looked at a simple training add-on.
Researchers tested EMS, also called NMES, on young football players.
They wanted to know if it could lift strength, sprint speed, and jumping power.

This was not a guess.
It was a real trial with real athletes.
The work was led by scientists at Majmaah University in Saudi Arabia.
Partners came from Teesside University in the United Kingdom and King Saud University.
The paper was published in PeerJ, a peer-reviewed science journal.
That means other experts checked the methods before it went public.

Sixty healthy collegiate male football players took part.
They were aged about 18 to 25.
All of them already trained.
None had a current lower-limb injury that stopped play.

The men were split into two groups of 30.
Both groups did the same plyometric work.
That included bounding, hurdling, and drop jumps.
Both groups also did strength training for the quadriceps.
They trained three days a week for eight weeks.

One group used real EMS during the strength work.
Pads sat over the thigh muscles and the femoral nerve area.
The machine made the muscle contract while the player pushed.
Each EMS session lasted 25 minutes.
The other group used a sham setup.
The pads were placed off the main nerve path.
The feeling was mild.
That let the team compare real EMS with almost none.

They measured three things before and after.
First was quadriceps strength on a dynamometer.
Second was a 50-metre sprint.
Third was a single-leg triple hop.

Both groups improved.
That already shows hard training works.
The EMS group improved more on strength and sprint time.

Look at the strength numbers.
The EMS group started near 145 units of torque.
After eight weeks they reached about 215.
That is a rise of about 69.
The sham group rose from about 145 to 166.
That is a rise of about 21.
The gap between groups was large.
The effect size for strength was 10.84.

Now the sprint.
The EMS group went from 9.19 seconds to 7.91 seconds.
The sham group went from 9.23 seconds to 8.61 seconds.
The extra gain with EMS was clear.
The effect size for sprint was 1.31.

The hop test also moved up in both groups.
The EMS group gained more metres on average.
The between-group gap was smaller and not statistically strong.
So the brightest signals were muscle strength and sprint speed.

Why might that happen?
EMS can drive extra muscle fibres to fire.
It can add force on top of a voluntary squeeze.
Paired with jumps and strength work, that extra drive may add up.

The study was built for one group.
Young male university football players.
The authors say the same idea may help other field sports.
Think rugby, netball, volleyball, and other sports that need speed and power.
Other young athletes who already train may see a similar extra lift.
The paper does not prove that for every sport or every age.
It does give a clear signal in this football group.

This is training research, not a medical treatment claim.
The players were healthy.
EMS sat on top of normal strength and plyometric work.
It was not used instead of training.
Anyone who tries a device should follow the maker’s guide and get coach or clinician advice.

The bright side is simple.
Eight weeks of smart work helped both groups.
Adding real EMS to that work gave a bigger jump in quadriceps strength.
It also shaved more time off the 50-metre sprint.
For footballers who already train, that extra edge is the point of the study.

The scientists were careful.
They used a sham group.
They kept the tester blind to who got real EMS.
They published the full methods.
That is why this blog can lean on the paper with confidence.

EMS is not magic.
Training still does the heavy lifting.
In this trial, pairing EMS with that training looked better for strength and speed than training with a dummy signal.

That is the story the numbers tell.
Young footballers got stronger.
They got faster over 50 metres.
The group that used real EMS moved further on those two tests.
Other power sports may want to watch this space.