Christopher Ellis demonstrates how to use neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to activate the quadriceps after surgery or when it's under-firing. Place one electrode on the mid-muscle belly and one above the knee, then use a 10-second on/10-second off cycle while actively contracting the quad during stimulation.
So if your quad is not firing as well as you'd like it to, following a surgery for example, you can use something called neuromuscular electric stimulation, also known as Russian stim. And a lot of these TENS units have it. So what you'll do is turn it on and look for this, this NMES. Turn that on. You just need 2 electrodes, hook up the leads to them, and then you're going to put one electrode on the muscle belly, so mid-muscle, And one towards the tendon, so just above the knee. So let me get up here, show you what it looks like. So one here on the tendon, one right there mid-muscle belly, like that. Perfect. And then I'm going to turn on the stimulation until you start to get a quad contraction. Hopefully you'll be able to see it. So I'm just starting to feel the tingling now, and now the muscle's starting to turn on by itself. So that's a really strong contraction there. Now I'm going to turn it down a little bit because you don't want to do all the work. Oh, and I should mention, you should put it on— there's a 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off. So you'll see when this turns orange, the muscle should start to contract again. There's usually a little delay because there's a ramp. It's starting to engage on its own. So it'll be 10 seconds off— or sorry, on. When that stops, you'll see it disengage like that. All right, so what you want to do is contract with the electric stimulation. So when this comes on, I'm going to squeeze my quad on. So you have someone lined up? So it's coming on. I'm going to squeeze. Hold with the, the whole 10-second contraction. When it turns off, I relax.
