Regarding Electrical Muscle Stimulation…I am a physical therapist and we use E-stim for several physical problems. It can be used with Bell’s palsy but offers varyhing results. It can be used to help stimulate quadriceps activity after an ACL reconstruction and help facilitate muscle use post-operatively. Understand this: E-stim does contract the muscle, and often times, it is uncomfortable to people. It will allow for increases in muscle strength, but it is no substitute for resistance exercise. When combined with resistance exercise, it can be more effective than either one alone. I saw bits of the contour abs promo, and the host is a highly trained athlete who is getting paid to sell this product. Don’t believe for a second that she uses belt alone to get those abs. Her training regimen keeps her slim and ripped looking.

A special note to those who are fat: doing all the situps and crunches or wearing of a muscle stimulator is not going to make your waist smaller or cause you to burn fat. To burn fat, the body needs oxygen to metabolize fat in an 8 step process called the Krebs’ Cycle. Strengthening exercises are anaerobic activities; bicycling, jogging, treadmill are aerobic activities that are aerobic. Intermittent muscle stimulation does not qualify. When you build up a muscle it gets bigger, not smaller. So, exercising the abs can potentially increase the size of your waste. To slim it down, get rid of the fat by doing cardio exercise, and use strengthening exercises to tone and firm abdominals.

Finally, there really is no such thing as contracting the lower abs over the upper abs. If a muscle contracts, it contracts–period. If you hooked up an E-stim unit to your biceps on the lower end of the muscles, and it made the muscle stronger, it’s not as though only a small part of the biceps would increase it’s muscle mass. The advantage that bodybuilders have with altering their exercises for a muscle is to activate muscle confusion; different movements keep the nervous system from getting used to a routine, thereby challenging the body to respond and adapt.