Burn 550 calories in 20 minutes

My heart was racing as if I had just broken an Olympic record and sweat (a bit gross, yes) was streaming down my forehead. It sounds like I was torturing myself for an hour in some CrossFit box, but it was just 20 minutes of exercising and burning 550 calories.

Burning double what you lose when boxing in less than half an hour sounds too good to be true. Right? But it’s not. By the way, this is not a lazy story. If my (finally) hernia-free back allowed it, I would love to box every day at the gym. Unfortunately, I’m out after one lesson, so I have to be careful. That’s why I take a beginner’s Pilates class on the reformer once a week and have myself stimulated twice a week with EMS training. Wait, what? Stimulated?

The first time I did EMS, I was eagerly squeezing some stress balls, because it’s an uncomfortable idea to have some voltage zapped through your body. It feels a bit like The Green Mile when someone is adjusting the knobs on a machine you’re connected to with some high-tech life jacket. I felt muscles tighten that I didn’t even know I had, and I was groaning and moaning around my house for two days, that’s how sore I was. But once I knew what was coming, it turned out to be fun.

How does it work? Your muscles are optimally utilized through Electro Muscular Stimulation while you do squats, lunges, and more of those usual gym exercises. When you exercise yourself, you only use a small part of the muscle, and that’s the secret of EMS. The difference is that you’re done in 20 minutes, but you have the results of three hours of strength training in your pocket. Which is ideal for me, because I trigger the nerve in my back way too quickly with all those repetitions in a normal class. This way, I can actually work out, build muscle mass, and get back in shape, but without overloading myself. It’s the ideal sport if you want to recover from injuries, and even top athletes do it to strengthen themselves. Now, I don’t want to put myself in that category, but it is handy.

And just when you think you can handle this task, the trainer adds a little extra, and you (me, that is) are lying on the floor sweating and completely exhausted after 20 minutes. I train at Fit & Fast in Hilversum, but by now, you can find an EMS training in every self-respecting city. Do you have injuries and problems with exercising? It’s really worth trying.