If your body is a temple, then the gym is a sanctuary. It’s no longer a place to just sweat for an hour, but a third space where culture, wellness, health, physiology, fashion, science, bodies, and beauty meet. Our Working It Out package investigates modern fitness and its increasing impact on our everyday lives.
I wanted to believe in Buffy. When Sarah Michelle Gellar told me recently in an interview that EMS was one of her new favorite things, I wanted to suit up right away. She also said the magic words: that electrical muscle stimulation was like “doubling up your workouts,” getting twice the benefit from the same moves.
EMS workouts are a newish trend, in which electrodes are placed directly onto muscles—which thus “bypasses the brain and spinal cord and causes a contraction of the target muscle,” says Sarah Crawford, DPT, a physical therapist in Cincinnati. The method has long been used in physical therapy and rehabilitation for patients who are unable to activate or move muscles themselves, due to injuries or illnesses like strokes. Bruce Lee reportedly used it in the ’70s, it was part of Tom Holland’s movie prep, and you can find it today at the Alo Wellness gyms in L.A. and New York, schedule a workout via text with the fitness company The EMS Studio, or buy a $3,000 Katalyst suit online, which includes a three-month training system. With a full suit on, you can stimulate your quads, abs, hamstrings, biceps, and back all at the same time. Suits have intensity levels that can be cranked up or down, as you perform your workout of choice such as running, HIIT, Pilates, and weight lifting.
Many people report being able to see their muscles twitch during the workout, and even lifting five pounds can feel impactful, says Alo’s lead EMS trainer, Darci Fistanic. It’s hard to tell how much is hyperbole, but when Chrissy Teigen recounted her EMS experience on The Kelly Clarkson Show, she equated the 20 minutes of working out to four hours. An October 2025 study of 46 participants from the Journal of Exercise Science & Fitness found that EMS might have some benefits, but that larger studies are needed. Compared to participants who did 25-minute EMS workouts, those who did a 90-minute full-body resistance training program showed better improvements in strength and reduced body fat percentages after 20 weeks. But the EMS subjects showed greater reductions in BMI and body weight.
How it feels depends upon the person and the level of intensity. Gellar said her friend said it felt like “labor pains”; she called this an exaggeration, but Fistanic snickers, “I have had mothers say to me, ‘This is kind of like a contraction.’ That’s why women can take it a lot higher than men.” People do ask Fistanic if they can still get some benefits even if they’re watching TV while wearing EMS, and the answer is, “You can absolutely do that. But I always tell people, ‘If we can move, we should be moving, right?’”
The most compelling part might be that EMS workouts are shorter than an episode of I Love LA. They’re generally limited to 20 minutes because of the risk of overtraining. “The only downside of EMS, and this applies to any workout where you would be really overtraining, is that you’re releasing something called cytokines into your bloodstream,” says Anna Herrin, founder of The Studio EMS. An excessive amount of lactic acid can be difficult for the kidneys to process. “I’m stronger today than I ever have been in my life, and I work out twice a week,” Fistanic tells me. Katalyst partner Maria Chapman, a former ballerina, and Herrin, a former model, also say they work out only twice a week now.
If it sounds too good to be true, Crawford is inclined to agree. While she believes that EMS is not dangerous, according to her, the benefits are not equal to suitless, old-fashioned workouts because the actions don’t coordinate with the brain. With traditional workouts, you work out your brain as you do your muscles. “There’s an area in the brain that gets excited when you decide you’re going to lift,” says Crawford. “That message gets easier and easier to deliver the more it’s practiced. When we use electrical stimulation to assist in that motion, we aren’t getting as good of a circuit response. We are not enhancing cortical signaling,” she says.
Exercise also helps the brain improve motor patterns. “When we choose to activate a muscle voluntarily, we get improved motor cortex adaptation. That’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for motor activities, moving the body, improved spinal cord circuitry, and coordination between muscles that have to work together,” Crawford explains, adding that EMS workouts can train a muscle to fire less efficiently. “We’re turning all the muscle fibers on and all the muscle fibers off, which is not what happens in normal physiologic movement. We’re retraining a muscle in a way that is not standard operating procedure.” Her ideal candidate: “If you’re a sedentary person, if you’re somebody who has not exercised in a long time and can’t tolerate load, I think the electrical stimulation exercise is a good place to start.”
Fistanic notes that those who are pregnant or have pacemakers should not use EMS suits. But she also argues that EMS’s ability to bypass the brain is a plus for people unable to access their brain-body connection. There is one low setting on her suit that she compares to feeling like tapping therapy, in which connecting with or touching certain meridian points can help people relax and feel calm, and clients have said it helps with depression and anxiety. She’s also found that new mothers have found EMS, used on the lower abdomen, to be a form of pelvic rehab. Fistanic used to teach prenatal and postnatal Pilates and is aware of how the pelvic floor is heavily affected after pregnancy.
“I turn on the EMS and they just start crying. ‘I never thought I was ever going to be able to feel that feeling again,’” she has heard. “It’s nice to get somebody shredded for a movie or really toned, defined bodies right before they get on the runway. But to work with people that have had injuries or with mothers who have just given birth is a gift and one of the best compliments. They deserve to feel good again.”
A version of this story appears in the May 2026 issue of ELLE.
