When I demonstrate an FES cycling system, spasticity is usually in the room before I have finished setting up. A leg that will not settle onto the pedal. A knee that pushes out straight at the wrong moment. A foot that starts bouncing the instant it takes any weight. The person in the chair rarely calls it spasticity. They say their legs have a mind of their own, or that everything goes rigid when they transfer, or that the spasms wake them at three in the morning. The clinical word comes later, if it comes at all.

This article is for the person who has just been introduced to that word, or who has lived with the thing itself for years without anyone quite explaining it. I want to cover what spasticity and spasms actually are, why they happen after a spinal cord injury, a stroke or with multiple sclerosis, what they do to daily life, and what genuinely helps, from medication through to electrical stimulation. I will try to be clear about what the evidence shows and what it does not; if different people have told you contradictory things, that is partly because the field itself contains genuine uncertainty.

After a neurological injury, whether a spinal cord injury, a peripheral nerve injury, or a period of enforced immobility, clients often ask: "Will electrical stimulation bring the muscle back?"

I have learned to pause before answering, because "back" hides two quite different questions. The first is about size: will the muscle get bigger again? Obviously, this is what people notice when they look down at their legs. The second is about substance: will the tissue that returns actually be muscle, in the working sense of the word, rather than a mixture of shrunken fibres, fat and scar? This is less obvious to a client, but it's what we actually need. Researchers call this second property muscle quality, and it is the more important of the two. It is also the one that almost nobody explains to patients.

In this article, I want to walk through what muscle quality means, how it is measured, what happens to it after injury, and what electrical stimulation has been shown to do about it. I will cover both of the situations we work with: innervated muscle, where the nerve supply is intact and conventional stimulation applies, and denervated muscle, where the nerve supply has been lost and an entirely different approach is needed. The evidence differs between the two, and so do the limits of what is possible, and I will be plain about both.

One of the quieter worries in rehabilitation is rarely about the therapy itself. It is about money. Equipment is expensive, budgets are tight, and funding is often uncertain until late in the process. The fear we hear most is not "will this work," but rather "will I spend a significant sum and end up with the wrong thing, or with several things that do not work well together." Does this sound familiar?

It is a reasonable worry, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch. This article looks at one practical way of reducing that risk: choosing a single, flexible stimulator that covers several rehabilitation needs, rather than a separate machine for each. The device we have in mind is the Stim2Go, and the point is not so much the brand as the principle behind it.

Ask someone in the early stages of recovery from a spinal cord injury or stroke what they most want to do again, and the answers are often smaller and more specific than you might expect. Not "run a marathon." More often, it is something like rising from a chair without help, managing a transfer to the bed, or pushing up to standing so that getting to the toilet is your own business and nobody else's.

Sit-to-stand sits at the centre of all of that. It is one of the most important movements in daily life and one of the first functional milestones a therapist will work on. If you can move reliably between sitting and standing, a great deal of independence follows. This article looks at how electrical stimulation, and in particular a responsive electrical stimulation device like the Stim2Go, can support sit-to-stand practice as part of a wider rehabilitation programme.

Transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) has moved quickly from a research curiosity to a recognised tool in neurological rehabilitation. People living with spinal cord injury, stroke, and multiple sclerosis are asking us about it. Clinicians want to know which device to recommend. Equipment commissioners want evidence-led guidance before authorising spend that can run into tens of thousands of pounds per system.

A paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering on 12 May 2026 has added something important to that conversation. It is not a clinical trial. It is a careful study of the physics and physiology that govern which nerve fibres a tSCS device actually recruits. The finding is consequential, and it bears directly on the choice of device.

In short: the waveform you choose determines whether tSCS does the thing rehabilitation needs it to do.

Transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS) represents a promising noninvasive neuromodulation technique for rehabilitation in spinal cord injury (SCI) and other neurological conditions.

From this article you will gain a clear understanding of how tSCS is used as a priming tool within rehabilitation, the research principles that guide its clinical application, how it is integrated alongside task-specific therapy, and what types of functional improvements and neuroplastic changes clinicians aim to achieve when it is delivered consistently over time.