The Body’s Movement Intelligence is compromised by impact, strain or sprain or even stress.

 

What is the key to rehab? Using it. Finding a way to get your message through to those muscles that have become inhibited. NMR reveals the functional problem to the client. Passive ROM is not as educational as NMR followed by active resisted movement after correcting the movement strategy.

 

NMR is the fast track to changing default coping strategies that have arrived at a point of failure. A compensation pattern is helping us to function. It was not designed to do this function. NMReprogramming should be done before training or rehabilitating as part of the total rehabilitation strategy. Trying to rehab without it takes MUCH longer.

How much time does it take to re-create Neuromuscular Activation? It takes as much time as it takes to regain access to the correct neural pathway. This depends on a client’s body consciousness and how fast they are able to respond to cues. It also depends on the clarity and precision of the therapist’s understanding

 

 

A client can’t turn his neck. The right neck flexor fascia is rigid and short, he turns right by looking down; left is even more compromised for rotational ROM. There’s an obvious connection with the lack of movement between his shoulder blades. His Thoracic spine doesn’t rotate left. He’s braced short and tight on the right Thoracic extensors.

 

We have already made considerable progress but still the right side at C1/C2 is immobilized for forward translation. The rigidity of the tissue holding this locked in place feels like bone. The Chinese call this kind of tissue rigidity ‘muscle that acts like bone’. Some past event has strained or sprained the neck and knocked out the movement intelligence; caused a disconnect in the neural motor network. The neck, not knowing how to move, protects itself by freezing movement altogether and strapping the area with compensation patterns.

The ways we move are habits/strategies learned and stored in the Motor Coordination system. If we stop moving due to a whiplash, the body thinks we don’t want that area to be moving. So it creates a more dense tissue quality, that feels dehydrated and rigid, more like fascia, less like muscle.

 

The new default coordination in the area may bypass that muscle. It may be stuck in the “ON” or facilitated position or “OFF” in the inhibited condition. The body will manage without it and create a compensation pattern, ie., some other muscle takes over and becomes the default strategy for approximating the use of that muscle (like tucking your chin or looking with your eyes while you turn your neck). These compensation patterns eventually fail because they are doing a job they are not designed for. The neck goes rigid and loses the ability to move at all.

 

NMR is the fast track to changing default coping strategies that have arrived at a point of failure. A compensation pattern is helping us to function. This should be done before training or rehabilitating any dysfunctional joint.

 

When we use Manual Muscle Testing we are looking to establish connections, the ability to respond. We are looking to restore Movement Intelligence. Muscle Testing is NOT a test of strength.

 

Vernon Brooks and the Hierarchy of Motor Control states that passive ROM and imagined movement do not provide for learning in the motor control center. Since the writing of his book however, studies in Russia, done during the education of skilled movement in performance athletes, have shown that motor learning CAN be perfected by visualization. Clearly the initiative to learning new movement comes first from movement intention, the desire to do something. Whether this is driven by the limbic or survival system or by desire the end point is the same, although movements learned involving limbic activation are imprinted more quickly than rote learning and resist change after the initial threat is gone.

 

Muscle testing reveals the functional problem to the client’s proprioceptive feedback system. Longus Colli is facilitated; bi-lateral SCMs for forward translation are inhibited. Passive ROM is not as educational as MMT followed by assisted movement.

 

The next step was having my client THINK about forward translation while I did the actual lifting. This was the beginning of enabling his neck to remember being ABLE to perform forward translation at that segment. Even though results on your first try may be limited, in the space and time between today’s session and the next the tissue will begin to reorganize itself to perform the ‘intended’ and attempted movement. This is how we learn to do anything new or restore anything that has been lost.