The Truth About EMG

Everyone you’ve ever heard has called EMG trash.

It’s not.

This isn’t some Ryan Humiston defence. His content sucks. Don’t listen to it 😭 

See EMG has one big powerful use.

It tells us what our CNS is telling our muscles.

This can help us interpret which muscles are being preferentially recruited in certain places.

So I’ll cover a few things here.

1. How EMG can be useful to us

2. The problem with how people use EMG

3. An real life example of EMG being good

4. How this ties in to Neuromechanical Matching

Knowing which muscle is being recruited most in a position is cool as we can make predictions of which muscles will grow most from being loaded in that position.

Some joints are pretty complicated.

The shoulder and hips can move in every single direction. Now you know there are big arm/leg forward, and arm/leg back muscles but uh… sometimes the big forward muscles do back/down 😭 

This is why EMG can be useful, it helps us workout on those complex muscles what might be happening.

Now the problem lies in how some people extract the results.

There’s two big mistakes people make. 1) They focus too much on the activation and not enough on the motion. 2) They take numbers from different studies/people and combine them.

1. If we look at a range it might have the highest possible activation of a certain muscle, but if it’s super easy in that position it means nothing. For analysing movements EMG only matters in the hardest place of a movement.

2. If we take a look at different studies and compare numbers of activation between both studies and people, there’s going to be random variance. You’re no longer comparing movements/positions, you’re comparing people.

Those two reasons are why people have trashed on EMG, but they forget it still has use when you eliminate the two mistakes.

Then there’s a mistake which isn’t really a mistake, it’s a complete lack of understanding of EMG.

EMG show muscle activation as a ratio at points, not a score for how much growth occurs.

Muscles in a more shortened/lengthened position aren’t necessarily better/worse, but might be perceived that if you took their “score”.

Here’s an example of EMG being good.

This graph shows the difference in how the side delts are used in a shoulder press and a lateral raise.

This is the exercise everyone says you shouldn’t do because it’s just for front delts and useless for side delts…

Yet it actually has almost identical activation 😳 

Let’s look at the two possible mistakes people make.

1. Different positions isn’t a problem as the movement of a shoulder press, and a lateral raise follow the exact same arm path.

2. Different people/study isn’t a problem as this is ONE study sharing the effects of the SAME people.

Now you can sit back and go, oh yeah that makes sense.

This study is cool.

See EMG gives us a huge look into Neuromechanical Matching so long as those two mistakes aren’t made.

If you take a look at an EMG study without those two mistakes being made, you can make predictions on what an exercise will bias.

THAT IS VERY POWERFUL!

Not in a gym hack way from yesterday…

In a genuine this will help pick exercises to improve weaknesses/balance.

Don’t let people call EMG worthless in front of you when EMG can actually be used.

It’s not a silver bullet in destroying an argument.

That being said, have a great day!

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher

P.S. Soon I’ll be doing a proper in depth piece of content about Neuromechanical matching, especially explaining what happens with those complicated joints… some peoples’ pulldowns are biasing their lower chests 😳