Effects of Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation Training on Endurance Performance

Various electrical stimulation modalities are used as adjuvants to conventional training and rehabilitation programs to increase bodily function or to reduce symptoms, such as pain. One of these modalities, neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES), commonly refers to the transcutaneous application of electrical currents to a target muscle group with the objective to depolarize motor neurons and consequently elicit skeletal muscle contractions of substantial intensity (usually ranging from 10 to 60% of the maximal voluntary contraction). Because NMES can generate considerable muscle tension, it is frequently used as a strength training technique for healthy adults and athletes, but also as a rehabilitation tool to increase or preserve muscle function and mass in individuals with muscle weakness or patients who cannot perform voluntary contractions [e.g., patients suffering from chronic heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), or critical illness; for reviews, see Roig and Reid, 2009; Sillen et al., 2009; Sbruzzi et al., 2010; Maddocks et al., 2011; Maffiuletti et al., 2011; Smart et al., 2013; Burke et al., 2016]. Under certain conditions, NMES training may also improve muscle oxidative capacity and result in a fast-to-slow muscle fiber type transition (Perez et al., 2002; Gondin et al., 2011a), which could potentially enhance endurance performance. However, the relevance of such adaptations in skeletal muscle tissue for the translation to functional performance that is particularly important for sport and daily activities is not always self-evident, mainly because of the heterogeneity in study populations, NMES parameters, and outcome measures. Unfortunately, the bodies of literature that either focus on mechanistic (i.e., muscle endurance) or clinical (i.e., functional endurance) outcomes are often too disconnected. In this opinion paper, we aim to bring these bodies of literature together and discuss the impact of high- vs. low-frequency NMES training on muscle vs. functional endurance in healthy vs. clinical populations. As such, we focus on human studies that chronically applied NMES for at least 3 weeks in healthy persons and patients, and distinguish between the effectiveness of non-tetanic low-frequency NMES (that is usually administered continuously at frequencies close to 10 Hz) and tetanic high-frequency NMES (that is usually administered intermittently at frequencies close to 50 Hz) on muscle endurance and functional endurance. For clarity purposes, we refer to muscle endurance as the exercise-induced decline in voluntary or electrically-evoked force (Duchateau and Hainaut, 1988; Gondin et al., 2006) or the endurance time of a sustained single-joint contraction (Gondin et al., 2006). In contrast, we refer to functional endurance as the maximal oxygen consumption or workload (Perez et al., 2002; Porcelli et al., 2012), the distance covered in a given time (e.g., 6-minute walk test) or the endurance time (Kim et al., 1995) for whole-body exercises such as walking and cycling. In the last section, we will provide some recommendations for better clinical use of NMES, and suggest potential directions for future research.