Russian Stimulation Exercise

Physical Therapy uses many interventions to help patients regain their muscular strength. One modality commonly used is Russian Stimulation. Russian stimulation was developed by Dr. Yakov Kotz in the 1970s. It was used to help individuals increase their muscular strength by using different “variation of alternating currents”. It can be used by those who have had an injury and are trying to strengthen the muscles that were hurt, or it can be used by athletes to increase their muscular strength. Kotz said Russian stimulation “is a 2,500 Hz alternating sinusoidal current that is interrupted and delivered in short bursts”. This is defined as a burst current, the trait that makes Russian stimulation different from other electrical stimulation units.1
This unit operates best at a 10/50/10 burst of time. This means the machine does not act on the muscles for the first ten seconds, which is an “off” …show more content…
Some of the early experimenters for Russian stimulations were Ward and Shkuratova, and Selkowitz. They were able to show that Kotz was correct about the Russian stimulation being able to re- education muscles. But these researchers also found that Russian stimulation was not “more effective than exercise alone nor was it evident that is was better than other forms of stimulation”.3 In an experiment testing different kilohertz-frequency alternating currents Ward found that Russian was not the best stimulus. His research found that Russian was “suboptimal for achieving their stated goals and that greater benefit would be obtained using short-duration (2- to 4-millisecond) burst of kilohertz frequency AC…”.4 But Selkowitz was able to do a study with Russian stimulation and exercise that showed “significant increases in isometric strength compared with the exercise only group”.