♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi folks I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- And we are the most famous physical therapist
on the internet.
- In our opinion of course, Bob.
- What is the difference between TENS and EMS?
That's the topic of today's video.
- Pop quiz, huh? - There we go.
We're gonna see if anybody knows the answer.
Well, the first thing, let's talk about what TENS is.
TENS is Transcutaneous Electrical Neural Muscular
Stimulation or Nerve Stimulation.
- That's a mouth full.
- What is EMS?
EMS is Electrical Muscle Stimulation.
So with TENS generally,
we're gonna give you the short answer here.
We're not gonna ramble on here.
(laughs)
With TENS generally,
the idea is you're kind of decrease your pain levels.
- Right, manage your pain, get off opioids,
make life more enjoyable that way.
- Right, EMS basically, you're trying to strengthen a muscle
or retrain it to start working again.
- Right? - Let's start off with TENS.
A good example for TENS would be,
if you have like chronic pain in your trapezius muscles,
you to get those knots up here.
And you're taking daily medication, pain medication.
You'd like to get off the pain medication.
You could try the TENS unit actually hook it up.
Brad, do you mind showing one? - Oh, sure.
- Maybe now's a good time to show one.
- Yeah, so here we have an eye relieve TENS unit.
This one is a nice rechargeable unit.
Here's the pads, I've got leads hooked up for one channel.
You can hook it up for two.
Actually you could treat two different locations with this.
When you have two channels,
one knee and then maybe on your hip or you could just,
when you use all four, get a larger area to manage the pain.
For example, on your low back.
- Yeah, what's nice about this particular unit?
It has TENS and EMS in it.
- Exactly. - So not all units have that.
If you're looking for both,
you wanna make sure that they do have it.
- Sure. - So anyway,
you could put it on the trapezius,
put the electrodes on there and you could leave it on
for 30 minutes up to 60 minutes, depending on how long
and the TENS help unit will hopefully decrease the pain.
Also might stimulate your natural endorphins.
- Sure.
- There's some natural pain relievers in you.
So I bought an example for EMS
with EMS, Electrical Muscle Stimulation.
It's commonly used after knee surgery.
- Sure - On the quadricep muscle.
The quadricep muscle, you have four muscles
that attach to your knee.
They tend to help straighten the knee
or they do help straighten the knee.
(laughs)
And sometimes after knee surgery
the brain tells the quad to go into protection mode.
So it stops the quad from working, it's the darnedest thing.
- And they atrophy very quickly.
- Atrophy yeah.
- And get smaller and we need to strengthen them.
It's pretty important for quads for walking
- Yeah, and they basically forget how to do their job.
And the EMS helps you retrain the muscle
so it starts working again. - Sure, yep.
- With Brad and I, in our opinion somewhat,
especially like the eye relieve,
we don't really feel like it's a unit to use
for bulking up your muscles.
- It's not our specialty to really I think to give
advice on that. - Advice on that.
- In physical therapy, people do not come to you to learn
how to-- - Yeah, to bulk up.
- To bulk up their muscles.
They're here for a functioning and therapy, pain relief.
I know one thing, I've used it a lot for is foot drop,
particularly after a stroke,
so that people can pull their toes up when they walk
so they don't drag their foot
and have that potential for falling.
That's a common use for (mumbles)
- And again, trying to reeducate the muscle
to start working on its own again.
That's what you're hoping to do.
- Sure. - All right.
Hopefully that explained the difference between the two.
(instrumental tone)