Restoring Movement Intelligence
The Movement Intelligence of the body is easily compromised by stress, impact, TBI, strain or sprain.
A client today can’t turn his neck: Rt SCM 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 like to rotate left. He’s short and tight on the right.
We have already made considerable progress but still Rt C1/C2 is immobilized for forward translation. The rigidity of the tissue holding this locked 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 in the nervous system. If we stop moving 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 stops engaging that muscle. It is stuck in the “ON” or facilitated position. 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. These compensation patterns eventually fail because they are doing a job they are not designed for.
NMR is the fast track to changing default programs that have arrived at a point of failure. A compensation pattern that is helping us be able to function. This should be done before training or rehabilitating any dysfunctional joint.
When we use Manual Muscle Testing we are looking for Connectivity, the ability to respond, not strength. We are looking to restore Movement Intelligence.
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.
How much time does it take to re-create Neural activation? What is the key to rehab? Using
it, i.e. finding a way to get your message through to those muscles that have become inhibited. Muscle testing reveals the functional problem to the client. 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 was the beginning of enabling his neck to re-construct itself to be ABLE to perform forward translation at that segment. Even though results on your first day 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.