The Neurological Basis for Whole Body Learning using NMR

The body is a living intelligent system.

Our nervous system, (our body), is constantly adapting to new stimuli and new information, that’s its job.

How the Body Learns

Studies decades ago informed the way we began to train athletes for world competition. Those studies showed that if the athlete watched the perfect tennis serve and imagined their body executing it, the body responded by being able to do it better. Their game improved BETTER than if they’d been practicing. Even as kids we similarly learn by watching.

When we want to learn something new, like snowboarding, the whole coherent coordination system is engaged in an experiment. This new movement initiative is first created and then stored in our cerebellum, gradually improving with practice. Similarly, our survival system is a collection of stored strategies involving metabolism and communication, motor messages and adaptation.

Movement intention precedes doing.

Recent studies have measured the impulse to movement already eliciting signals in the brain before the motor coordination of the body part actually takes action. The brain initiated what it intends for the body to do before electrodes on the actual muscles began to measure the impulse coursing through the limbs.

You will have limited success training a body part that is dysfunctional or inhibited. Exercise will have limited results. Failure to function results in the recruitment of other muscles to approximate a movement and sometimes results in adhesion of the muscle in question to other tissues in an attempt to splint to synergists for the lack of response when a message is sent. These muscles do not build normally in response to exercise.  The same exercise done with two legs will show one leg responding with bigger muscle volume that the other.  The inhibited muscle will become tight and more rigid, lacking in elasticity and hydration. It will be more prone to re-injury.

However, any muscle that is tight will create inhibition elsewhere. The problem of persistent weakness spreads.

In this way gradually our body becomes more and more restricted with decreasing tissue quality over time even though undertaking exercise. This is what we can sense with muscle tests, ie., the body’s inability to get its messages through to the muscles.

How Muscle Testing Helps Assess Muscle Condition

Muscle tests, which are quite subjective, do not depend on a measurement to assess neuromuscular connectivity or conductivity. The ability to match 2 oz, 2 lbs, or 20 lbs of pressure should feel the same, ie., feel relatively effortless requiring no special bracing by holding the breath or using a compensatory strategy such as retraction of a limb into the socket, bending of the knee or elbow in order to recruit bicep or biceps femoris or generally stiffening the limb or a distal muscle to brace for a more proximal muscle’s failure to fire.

The ability to match a pressure gives us a way to assess the response-ability of a muscle. Our body’s communication system, our sensory and motor messages are measured in microvolts. Thought in the form of movement intention, generates microvolts of current through our tissue. Research done on Emily Conrad (Continuum) and Roselyn Bruyere (well known and studied Psychic) in the 1970s clearly demonstrated the microvolts of movement intention from the cerebellum to a muscle in response to a thought.

Movement intention initiates a memorized strategy for accomplishing a specified task. When a muscle fails to fire a compensatory muscle substitutes. These defaults obscure the body’s ability to change from exercise alone. Exercise will always use the compensatory pathways and miss-fire the muscle needing rehabilitation due to the memorized patterns of response well practiced over time.

How NMR Promotes Muscle Learning

NMR through the use of muscle activation against resistance in a defined sequence of testing, enables the body to feel itself and thereby learn a new strategy. Feeling a muscle fail to fire, gives a sufficient feedback to enable the body to try alternate pathways, the way the body learns anything new. By trial and error it links up neurons to dendrites until it makes the correct connection to accomplish a result. NMR is simply a method of inquiry to help the body to feel itself and in this way to more quickly learn new strategies of movement, it is a conversation with a living intelligent system that enables it to reprogram itself.

When a muscle is ‘tested’ or tapped or rubbed it becomes self aware. For a brief period of time after the stimulus the connections between the brain and the muscle are illuminated/ connected/ conscious. Failing to match someone’s pressure is a felt sense.
The body is aware of a failure to connect even when the client’s mind does not agree with you. Really we have nothing to prove. We are testing in order to ‘cue’ the brain for new learning. Until it fails to function it has no reason to wake up and change anything. Frequently all that needs to change is a default response mechanism, the habit of leading with a specific muscle.