I first tried EMS training in Southern Korea. I have a good buddy of mine who's from South Korea, and he had been telling me every South Korean male has to take two years in the military.
He had been training to prepare for that time and he had been doing this EMS training a couple of times a week. I was going to visit Thailand with a couple of friends, and on my way back I had a ten-hour layover in Korea. So, on my way back, he picked me up from the airport and told me, "Hey, you got to check out this thing that I've been doing for all my workouts to prepare for boot camp."
He took me to the gym where he had been training at, and explained the whole system to me and how it worked. I got changed into the same suits that we now use for all of our training. If you've seen any of our training, you know there's an undergarment that you have to wear and the first time we put anybody into it they have the same reaction of, "What the heck am I wearing?"
His trainer came out with the device and spoke very little English. He starts hooking me up to the suit with my buddy translating and we start the stimulation, and you get started by setting the initial parameters for each muscle group. It feels very strange at the beginning, and all of a sudden your muscles are starting to contract really hard and you start doing movements. The Korean trainer is yelling at me in Korean to do all these things, my buddy is translating for me, and I'm going through the workout.
I remember the intense contractions that we were able to get in the suit and being surprised by how tough it was. We only did ten minutes of the muscle development program in the suit and then five minutes of cardio program in the suit, but I was completely smoked up afterwards.
I got out of the suit and went to change and in the locker room feeling amazing.
My muscles felt like they had been completely worked, but there was no stress on the joints. The rest of my body felt amazing, which is a little dissimilar to what I was used to with weight training.
This is all in a ten-hour layover, so after the workout, we all eat and he takes me back to the airport for a 16-hour flight back to the States. I'm sitting on the flight starting to get sore, and more sore, and more sore, and ended up being the most sore I've ever been after a workout.
When I arrived home I knew I needed to buy a system for myself and my clients. I contacted XBody, the company that manufactures the EMS system that we currently use and that I used in Korea, but it wasn't available in the States yet. I never heard back from them so I continued with traditional weight training.
A few years later, in 2019, I received an email from XBody letting me know they were coming to the US and would be available. I was in their first training class on the West Coast to get certified and I've been using it for all my workouts and my clients' training ever since.
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