Bjoern Woltermann Revolutionizing Health and Fitness: The Power of EMS Technology, Part 2
In this episode of Health Gig, Bjoern Woltermann delves deeper into the groundbreaking technology of EMS (electro muscle stimulation). Katalyst is a wearable training suit designed to revolutionize wellness. Woltermann's insights stress the importance of a long-term approach to health, focusing on lasting habits rather than short-term fixes.
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Website: https://www.katalyst.com/healthgig
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/katalystfit
Quotes:
Muscles allow your skeleton to move. So everything that you want to do in life, you need muscles to do those things. So the more muscles you have, the more you use them, and the stronger they are, the easier things are. - Bjoern Woltermann
When creating Katalyst, I thought, I can do this much better, and we can really use this technology to impact people's lives at a large scale, and that became a ten-year journey. - Bjoern Woltermann
We know the body absolutely runs on electricity. And what we know is when you are dehydrated, it doesn’t work as well. - Bjoern Woltermann
Show Notes:
Bjoern Woltermann: What we've created was a suit that comprises of basically four components. So you're wearing a specific base layer which comprises of a shirt and some shorts. It's kind of like your undergarment that you're wearing underneath this, and they're optimized for like signal conductivity and they're also a little bit longer.
Bjoern Woltermann: generally if you design a base layer, you want the sweat being taken away from the body as fast as possible because you want a dry skin that's like really what you want because otherwise you're freezing and so on and so forth. If you did that, the conductivity and signal transmission to the skin would go away. So we had to actually reverse engineer something that exactly works the other way around.
Bjoern Woltermann: we build a lot of adjustability into this for two reasons. Number one, we want good compression. It feels a bit tight because you want the contact between the skin and the suit always to be in really good shape. The other aspect of that is we know people's body are changing quickly.
Bjoern Woltermann: the reason why we're doing this is because we want to train the muscle through the whole range of motion. You don't just want to be strong in one position. We actually want to also give you mobility. That's important. So part of your ability to use your muscles and your body and really feel good in your body is also you want range, right? You want an open chest and you want a strong posture and so on and so forth.
Bjoern Woltermann: moving through this actually helps you train the muscle in all states like fully contracted, fully elongated and so on and so forth, but also helps you with good posture. It helps you with good breathing.
Bjoern Woltermann: Very heavy weights do two things. They force you to activate as many muscle fibers of your muscle as you can, which is best case, 50%. And they also put stress on your bones, which you want for bone cells to be active, to calcify, which is osteoporosis. Problem is the other problem, which is sarcopenia. Unfortunately, bad news. Women are also more affected by that. Osteoporosis is much more a female topic than a male topic. It's also testosterone and hormonal related. Definitely in terms of heavy weights, heavy weights were needed so that you have to recruit as many muscle fibers while you're doing a motion. What we are doing is you can voluntarily basically activate up to 40 to 50%. And the reason why that is, is it's an old like survival aspect. So a muscle cell needs a certain amount of time to replenish. It needs to replenish its nutrients and gets old stuff out, new stuff in like ATP in and so on and so forth. Recharge and a muscle cell can only contract or not contract. It's a binary thing. It's either or. The question is just how many muscle fibers are firing in parallel and that determines how much force you are creating. They are not individually deciding do 20%, 30%. They either on or off. That's literally what it is. So now it's a question of how many of your muscle fibers are firing and then how strong are the individual muscle fibers. So, for example, a bigger muscle has like bigger fibers.
Bjoern Woltermann: If I have bigger muscles, it means some of the weak muscle fibers broke down during workout and got replenished by or like replaced by a stronger one. That's basically how muscles grow, like a bigger muscle has as many muscle fibers as your weaker ones. They just got broken down and replaced by stronger ones. That's literally what you do in training. And this is why you feel one of the theories, why you feel soreness is like, you know, there's a micro inflammation because some of these muscle fibers got injured and you want that. They want them destroyed so that they can be replaced with a stronger one. You cannot build new ones like, you know, that's genetically not possible in this heavy weight lifting scenario. You are going what you voluntarily can activate at the max, which is like 40, 50%. And now what Catalyst is doing and other trainings are doing is like you're superimposing a signal and you are telling the muscle to actually fire more than that. So now you're firing up to 90% of your muscle fibers in parallel, which means you get a very, very strong contraction, which also means you're getting a stronger breakdown.
Bjoern Woltermann: you do this without the external load so you don't have the joint impact, you don't have the ligament problems, you don't have bad form issues and risk. But let's use a biceps curl as an example. So if I do a biceps curl, the biceps is contracting and in training, the triceps is also contracting. It's under tension, but it's being elongated. It's an eccentric contraction, right? So it's like it's being elongated, right? So my triceps is elongated, but it's still under tension. So that now creates the counter force. You've heard of negatives, right? So, for example, if you can't do a pull up and you want to learn how to do a pull up, get on a box, get up and let yourself down very slowly and then get on the box again, let you get down. It is a training to get to your first pull up. It's actually the best training to get to your first pull up because the eccentric contractions are now forcing a muscle cell that is under tension to break. Some of them break At the end they break. So now they break. They get replaced by something stronger. And this is how you build muscle. This is how we do this, because we always try. Trigger the agonist and antagonist. Like, you know, we always like trigger both sides and this is how we can help the body get stronger without heavy external loads.
Bjoern Woltermann: The mindset that I think we have to change in health and fitness is when you interview people and you ask them like, Hey, what are you doing? And like, you know, what if you or I tried 15 different things, right? So I tried this and this and that and the other. And at the end of the day, what's telling you those sorts of 15 things that have not worked for me because otherwise you would have stuck with it.
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