Saturday, August 09, 2008

Dara Torres receiving electronic muscle stimulation?

During the Dara Torres profile I noticed she had Frankenstein-like electrodes attached to her quads and her muscles were twitching at what seemed like 100s-of-times-a-minute via the electronic stimulation. It was during the warm up part of her stretch routine while all of her "yoga ninjas" were walking on her quads, rolling their feet over her shoulders and doing all sorts of "dark arts" stretching stuff to her.

I wish I could afford all that. It would probably add 10-years to your life too. More stretches here [Link]

I wonder what the scientific validity of electronic muscle stimulation is. Does it make her muscles bigger or just warm her up.?

1 comment:

Scott said...

Electro-physiotherapy is very common. I've had it applied three or four times to help rehabilitate my knees. It can be used to passively exercise atrophied muscles, but for athletes it's used primarily to stimulate tissue metabolism and improve blood circulation (for faster recovery). Speeding up the healing of bone fractures is the other major use. The more muscle mass you have the higher the voltage you need to activate the muscles - it didn't take me very long at all to reach the equipment's max output. I can't see it having any appreciable effect on Torres and her impressive physique. It would seem more logical her use of electro-stimulation in the middle of an interview is more for PR (look at all the weird things I do which help make me really different from the rest of the world) and so provide some cover for her continuing to improve into her forties.