WINDHOEK - In the age where technology is at the center of people’s daily lives, even the busiest of people can choose to remain fit and healthy with electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) workout sessions.
With EMS, fitness enthusiasts or anyone who wants to remain fit and healthy gets to experience a full body workout using impulse current.
New Era recently got a chance to experience an EMS workout session and interview Daphne Sam, the Managing Director of Body 20, one of two South African EMS franchises operating in Namibia.
She explained that just as our central nervous system constantly sends electrical impulses to control our muscle action, EMS mimics this natural principle and is able to intensify this process to reach muscle layers, which can be difficult to activate through conventional training.
“This is achievable by applying EMS electrodes to the skin, directly above the muscle. EMS can simply be explained as an elective external intensification electrical stimuli. You will gain the best results if you work out actively while using our EMS device,” she explained.
Muscles are additionally stimulated through the electrodes when doing a series of low impact exercises. This combined training method leads to an addition increase of tension thereby producing highly effective training results,” explained Sam.
Depending on an individual’s level of fitness and desired goals, training sessions will either be low impact with basic exercises to awaken muscles or high impact, with strong contractions and dynamic exercises to activate deep muscle hypertrophy.
“Your personal trainer can control each muscle group by adjusting the training intensity to meet your individual goals. With EMS, you are able to achieve tangible and sustainable success in a very short time. A single Body 20 workout delivers the benefit of four hours of conventional weight training sessions,” explained Sam.
Opening Body 20
Sam who is the founder of Body 20 explained that the idea to start an EMS gym in Namibia was conceived in 2016 when she trained as a body builder.
“Normally towards competition time you start eating a lot less calories but you still have to push even harder in the gym but you don’t have the same amount of energy. That’s when I started researching on this because it gives you the same results as being in the gym for four to six hours without having to work for that long.
“You come in for twenty minutes and get the same impact as you were training in a conventional gym for that long,” explained Sam.
She also realised that there are people out there who like her are either wives, mothers or busy professionals who want to keep fit and maintain a healthy lifestyle but do not have the time to be in a conventional gym for hours. After extensive research on Body 20 studios and traveling to South Africa, Sam finally managed to open Body 20 for the Namibian market.
“I started going to all their studio sessions. And I saw a huge difference in my body for going to their studio once a month compared to being in a conventional gym for three months. I approached them to find out if they would consider opening up a franchise for Namibia. They were very helpful and keen because they had not considered coming to Windhoek. In June, we bought our licence and in September we opened our doors,” she explained.
Both young and old have trained at the studio since it opened doors, with the oldest client being 64 years old.
“We’ve had about 120 members. We train anybody. Whether you’re a beginner or advanced. Our equipment are easy on the joints because you don’t pick up weights. You use your own body weight whereas in a conventional gym to see results you would have to pick up weight in order to build muscle and that’s how some people get injuries,” she added. All the sessions are with a personal trainer and exclusivity is guaranteed.
“We’re very private. We take in a maximum of two clients per session. And normally the two clients that we do take are either two friends or two partners. We don’t take two strangers. But the studio can also accommodate two clients whether together or not. We receive about 20 clients in a day,” explained Sam.
She added: “It’s very exclusive because most of our politicians and business people don’t have the time to go to a normal gym and when they do go to a normal gym, they have so many people looking at them and they don’t get to achieve the goals that they want to. They come in here, workout for 20 minutes and they leave, they leave so quick that no one knows they were here.”