This is my own log from my own suit, which I paid for myself. I run this site, and we earn a commission if you buy a Visionbody through our link. That has no bearing on anything below.
I used an EMS suit two to three times a week for three months, somewhere north of thirty sessions. This is what that actually involved: my real schedule, the intensity levels I ended up on for each muscle group, which programmes I used and which I ignored, and the thing nobody writing about EMS seems to mention.
Which is that it is hard.
Why I bought a suit at all
The first time I tried EMS was in a studio. Twenty minutes, a trainer, one of those wired setups. I walked out and felt incredible for the rest of the day. Not "nice workout" good. Properly buzzing. I had done something genuinely difficult in twenty minutes and my brain knew it.
That feeling is what sold me, not the marketing. Studio EMS in most cities runs $40 to $80 a session, so twice a week for a year is somewhere north of $4,000. A suit is a one off. Then a few friends and I set up a muscle gain and fat loss challenge, and that was the excuse I needed.
My exact EMS schedule
I ramped, which I would recommend to anyone.
| Period | EMS sessions per week | Rest between sessions |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 3 | 2 | 72 hours or so |
| Weeks 4 to 12 | 3 | 48 to 72 hours |
The 48 hour minimum is not me being precious. Whole body EMS recruits a lot of muscle at once and the soreness after an early session is not like normal soreness. Going again the next day would have been a bad idea. Three a week with a proper gap is, in my experience, the ceiling for a home suit. Studios in Germany, where EMS has been mainstream for years, mostly cap clients at one or two a week.
Sessions are twenty minutes. That is the whole thing. Suit on, twenty minutes, done.
The intensity levels I actually used
This is the question I had before buying and could not find a real answer to anywhere. Every muscle group is a separate channel with its own percentage, and they end up nowhere near each other.
Mine landed roughly like this:
- Abs: about 20% maximum. That was my hard ceiling. Anything higher was not productive, it was just unpleasant, and abs seem to be the channel almost everyone has to keep low.
- Chest: up to about 70%. Comfortably my highest.
- Everything else: somewhere in between, and I moved them around week to week depending on what felt like it had recovered.
I did not keep a spreadsheet, so I cannot give you a channel by channel log. The pattern is the useful part: expect a three to four times spread between your lowest and highest channel, and expect to spend the first two or three sessions finding out where those are. Start everything low, run the session, and raise a couple of channels next time. The rule I used was simply whatever I could hold for twenty minutes without gritting my teeth.
If you set every channel to the same number, which is the obvious beginner mistake, your abs will decide the whole session and your chest will get nothing.
Which programmes I ran
The suit ships with a stack of programmes and I only ever used two.
- Muscle building, roughly twice a week. This was the workhorse. Longer contraction phases, and it is the one that leaves you actually tired.
- Fat loss, once a week. Faster, more continuous, less brutal. Good as the third session of the week when I did not want another heavy one.
I would not stress about the other programmes. Two is enough, and having a hard day and an easier day inside the week is a sensible structure whether or not electricity is involved.
The part I want people to hear: EMS is hard
Every ad for these suits sells convenience. Twenty minutes, no gym, no commute. All true, and all of it makes EMS sound like a shortcut where you stand there and the machine does the work.
It is not that.
Twenty minutes in a suit with the channels set properly is work. You are moving through the session, the contractions are firing, and by the end I am drenched. Not glowing. Drenched, the way I am after a real session in a gym. Take the suit off and you have that specific post workout feeling of having earned something.
And then you get the same thing I got in the studio the first time. A big hit of feeling great, like you could take on anything, for hours afterwards. That is the honest reason I kept going three times a week for three months rather than letting a $1,890 purchase sit in a cupboard, which is what happens to most home fitness gear.
So the pitch I would actually make is not "EMS is easy." It is: EMS is a hard twenty minutes that is genuinely convenient, and it pays you in dopamine at the end. Convenient and rewarding, not effortless.
Everything else I was doing
A suit is never the whole routine, and anyone showing you results from one without telling you the rest is not being straight with you. So here is the rest, as facts, not as advice. None of it is something I am recommending you buy and none of it is sold on this page.
Weights, once or twice a week. I kept lifting alongside the EMS. So the total was three to five training sessions a week, of which two or three were EMS. Anyone telling you a suit replaces the gym is selling something.
About 200 grams of protein a day. I was more consistent about this than about anything else on this list, and I think it mattered as much as any single session. Most of it came from food.
Creatine, daily. I mention it because it changes what a scan reads as lean mass in the first weeks, which is one reason I am not quoting a body composition number.
A couple of other things I was already taking. Nothing I would attribute any of this to, and nothing I am going to name and turn into a shopping list.
Deep stretching after every session, on whatever I had just worked. Long holds, not a token ten seconds. After twenty minutes of near continuous contraction it felt necessary rather than optional. This became the part of the routine I looked forward to.
I was coming back from a few months off. Worth saying, because returning trainees make faster progress than anyone and it colours everything.
The challenge itself. Four of us, money on it, group chat. I trained more consistently for three months than I had in the previous year. Do not underrate this. It is free.
So does the suit work?
I ran one three month block with five variables changing at once, which is a story and not an experiment. I cannot tell you what the suit did on its own and neither can anyone else selling you one.
What I can do is point at the research, which is unglamorous and worth knowing before you spend. Pooled across the controlled trials, whole body EMS produces average muscle mass gains of about 0.9 kg, so around two pounds, over training blocks of six to fifty four weeks. The strength effects are solid and consistent. The body fat effects, in the same meta analysis, did not reach statistical significance.
So: a real training stimulus, and a modest one on its own. If someone quotes you a dramatic transformation figure from a suit, the number is doing work that a diet and a training programme did.
My honest read after three months is that the suit is a real stimulus and an excellent adherence device. It got me training three times a week when I would otherwise have trained once, and everything else I did got better because I was in a routine at all. That is worth a lot, and it is a different claim from the one on the box. If you want the fuller picture of the evidence, we go through it properly in does EMS training actually work.
What I would do differently
- Write the channel percentages down. I did not, and now I cannot tell you my own numbers. Note them after every session for the first month.
- Start at three sessions a week later, not earlier. Three weeks at twice a week was about right. If anything I would give it four.
- Take proper before photos and keep a simple log. Three months is long enough that you forget where you started, and the day to day change is invisible to you.
- Not bother trying every programme. I ended up on two within a fortnight. Pick a hard one and an easier one and get on with it.
Would I buy it again
Yes, and for a reason that is a little different from the sales pitch. The thing I paid for turned out to be a twenty minute session I would actually do at 9pm on a Tuesday, which for me was the difference between training and not training. That is worth $1,890 to me. It would not be worth it to someone who already trains four times a week and likes going to the gym.
I use the Visionbody single system. It is $1,890 at the official store, and the code ROUTINES50 takes $56.70 off, which brings it to $1,833.30. The code should apply on its own through our link, but check the total reads $1,833.30 before you pay, and type ROUTINES50 into the discount field if it has not. Visionbody sometimes runs its own popup offer that replaces ours, and a cart only takes one code at a time.
If you want the full breakdown rather than my log, our Visionbody review covers the hardware and the warranty, EMS suit prices compares every model on the market, and EMS intensity settings goes deeper on the channel by channel question than I have here. If you are not sure you want to own one yet, find a studio near you and buy one session first. That is what I did.
More from our EMS hub
Frequently asked questions
How much muscle can you gain with an EMS suit?
The controlled research is the best guide. Pooled across trials, whole body EMS produces average muscle mass gains of about 0.9 kg, roughly two pounds, over training blocks of six to fifty four weeks, with solid strength gains alongside. I am deliberately not offering my own three month figure as a benchmark, because I was also lifting once or twice a week, eating 200 grams of protein a day and taking creatine, so my number would tell you nothing about what the suit did.
How many times a week should you use an EMS suit?
I did twice a week for the first three weeks, then three times a week for the remaining nine, always leaving 48 to 72 hours between sessions. Three a week with a proper gap is about the ceiling. Whole body EMS recruits a lot of muscle at once and the soreness after an early session is not like normal training soreness, so training the day after is a bad idea.
What intensity should you set an EMS suit to?
Different numbers for every channel. My abs topped out around 20% while my chest ran as high as 70%, so expect a three to four times spread between your lowest and highest muscle group. Start every channel low, complete a full twenty minute session, then raise one or two next time. If you set everything to the same percentage, your most sensitive channel decides the whole session and your strongest ones get almost nothing.
Is EMS training actually hard?
Yes. This is the part the marketing gets wrong. Twenty minutes with the channels set properly left me drenched in sweat every time, feeling like I had done a real workout, and followed by a couple of hours of feeling genuinely great. EMS is convenient and time efficient, but it is not effortless, and in my experience the fact that it feels like work is why people keep doing it.
Do you still need to lift weights if you use an EMS suit?
I kept lifting once or twice a week alongside three EMS sessions and I would do that again. EMS is a real training stimulus but it is not a replacement for loading a barbell, and nobody should buy a suit expecting to stop going to the gym. Our comparison of EMS against weight training goes through where each one wins.
Should you stretch after EMS training?
I stretched every muscle group I had just worked, with long deep holds rather than a token few seconds, and it became the part of the routine I looked forward to most. After twenty minutes of near continuous contraction it felt necessary rather than optional, and long hold stretching is well supported for range of motion and recovery.