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How I Discovered EMS Training in South Korea—and Brought It Home
Updated: Sep 29
The video above is my retelling of that first EMS experience. One technical point is worth keeping in mind: EMS can create a strong muscular stimulus with less external load than traditional resistance training, but the muscle contractions still produce force through joints and tendons.
That first session also left me far more sore than I would ever want a first-time client to be today. Current WB-EMS safety guidance emphasizes a gradual familiarization period precisely because an aggressive first exposure can create excessive muscle damage.
It started with a 10-hour layover in South Korea
My first EMS workout was not something I booked because I had researched the technology for months. It happened almost by accident.
A close friend of mine in South Korea had been using EMS while preparing for his upcoming military service. I was traveling through Asia and had a roughly 10-hour layover in Korea on the way home. He picked me up from the airport and told me I had to try the training system he had been using.
So instead of spending the layover in the terminal, I went with him to the gym.
My first reaction: what am I wearing?
The first part of the experience was the same reaction I still see from clients today. I changed into the tight underlayer, then the EMS suit went over it and the trainer connected the system.
His trainer spoke very little English, so my friend was translating while the trainer walked me through the setup and began calibrating the stimulation for each muscle group.
The sensation was completely new to me. As the intensity came up, I could feel muscles contracting hard before we even started moving. Then we began working through exercises while the stimulation cycled on and off.
Ten minutes of strength, five minutes of cardio—and I was smoked
The session itself was short. From what I remember, we did about 10 minutes using the muscle-development program and another five minutes using the cardiovascular program.
That detail matters more to me now than it did then. Those are not simply two intensities of the same EMS workout. The strength-focused program uses high-frequency intermittent stimulation to create stronger sustained contractions, while the cardiovascular program uses low-frequency continuous stimulation and creates a very different fatigue and metabolic profile.
We now break those settings down in detail in XBody EMS Programs Explained.
At the time, though, I did not care about any of that. I just knew I had done 15 minutes of training and felt like I had worked incredibly hard.
Then came the flight home—and the soreness
After the workout we ate, my friend took me back to the airport, and I got on a long flight back to the United States.
As the flight went on, I kept getting more sore. By the time I was home, it was one of the most intense bouts of post-workout soreness I had ever experienced.
Today, I would not treat that as proof that the workout was “better.” It is actually a good example of why first-time EMS dosing matters. Severe soreness is not the goal, muscle damage is not required for muscle growth, and new users should not be pushed immediately toward maximal stimulation.
The current international WB-EMS safety recommendations call for a structured familiarization phase over roughly the first 8–10 weeks, with deliberately reduced initial intensity and conservative session frequency. The goal is to let the person adapt to an unfamiliar electrical training stimulus before progressing it aggressively.
Our EMS safety guide explains the current recommendations and warning signs in much more detail.
Why I still wanted one immediately
Even with the soreness, the training experience stuck with me because it gave me a resistance stimulus I had never felt before.
I had already been training clients for years. I understood traditional resistance training, and I was not looking for a shortcut around it. What interested me was that electrical stimulation gave us another way to create and control muscular demand.
That opened up programming possibilities: strong contractions with relatively little external load, multiple large muscle groups being stimulated during the same movement, and electrical intensity that could be adjusted separately by body region.
What caught my attention was not “electricity replaces exercise.” It was that electricity could become another resistance variable inside good exercise programming.
I contacted XBody—and then waited
When I got home, I contacted XBody because I wanted to use the same type of system with my own clients. At that point, the system I had used in Korea was not yet available to me in the United States.
So I went back to what I was already doing: conventional personal training and strength work.
A few years later, in 2019, I heard from XBody that they were entering the U.S. market. I joined one of their early West Coast training classes, completed the training process, and started incorporating the system into my own workouts and client sessions.
What has changed since that first workout
The biggest change is not the fact that I use EMS now. It is how much more precise my understanding of the technology has become.
Early on, I was impressed mainly by how intense the contractions felt and how little external weight was required. Years of coaching with the system—and thousands of sessions later—have made the programming questions much more important than the novelty.
Now I care about which stimulation program we are using, the frequency and duty cycle, how much current each muscle group actually needs, what voluntary movement is paired with the stimulation, how the client is progressing, and whether the training dose matches the person’s recovery capacity.
That is the difference between simply wearing an EMS suit and actually programming WB-EMS well. Our XBody system guide explains the control side in detail.
What I would tell someone trying EMS for the first time
Do not chase the highest intensity on day one. Your first session should introduce the stimulus, not test how much electricity you can tolerate.
Soreness is not the scorecard. A useful session should create an appropriate training stimulus without trying to make walking difficult for the next three days.
Ask what program is being used. Strength, endurance and recovery settings create different contraction patterns and should be selected for a reason.
The exercises still matter. The suit can increase muscular demand, but movement selection and coaching determine what you are actually training.
Your trainer should adjust muscle groups individually. The same current level is not appropriate for every body region.
Give the method time. Judge EMS the same way you would any training program—by changes in strength, performance, body composition, movement and consistency over weeks and months, not by one dramatic session.
Why this story still matters to Active Wave
I did not discover EMS from a sales presentation or buy a system because it was trending. I experienced it first as a trainer who had already spent years working with conventional exercise.
That first workout made me curious enough to keep following the technology until I could use it professionally in the United States. The years since then have made me more interested in where EMS fits—and more skeptical of exaggerated claims about what it can do.
That is still how we approach it at Active Wave: use the technology where it gives us a real programming advantage, keep the parts of traditional strength and conditioning that still matter, and be specific about what the evidence actually supports.
References and further reading
The personal story above is my own experience. The safety and muscle-damage discussion is supported by current WB-EMS guidance and peer-reviewed literature below.
Try EMS training in your own home
Active Wave starts with a complimentary 90-minute in-home consultation and trial: goals and training-history review, movement and body-composition assessments, and a coached EMS session with conservative first-session calibration so you can experience the technology without recreating my overly aggressive first workout in Korea.
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