Muscle Activation with New Leaf House Call Chiropractic
Optimize the muscle-brain connection with help from our team. Read more below!
What is muscle inhibition?
Your body is an intricate, adaptive organism with many parts working together to get you through your daily activities. When a specific muscle in your body becomes overloaded, either through an acute injury or chronic overuse, a neurological circuit breaker is tripped.
Your brain essentially turns down the power to those overloaded muscles, keeping them from producing more than a small percentage of their potential force. This obligatory time off reduces risk of further injury and allows the injured muscle to rest and heal. This is known as muscle inhibition.
If my muscles are inhibited, why can I still move my body?
During muscular inhibition, your brain allows your body to continue accomplishing daily activities by shifting the load to your remaining working muscles. These uninjured muscles help compensate for inhibited muscles by bearing a heavier load until healing can take place.
Once your injured tissues have healed, the brain usually flips the circuit breaker back on, restoring full, pain-free muscle function once again. However, sometimes the brain-muscle connection remains suppressed. The compensatory pathways become so ingrained in your brain’s default motion patterns that the muscle remains inhibited, despite there being no residual injury.
This starts to overwork your uninjured muscles that have been bearing an extra load, eventually leading to their breakdown or failure. This is one way an ankle sprain can lead to knee, hip, and low back problems in the future.
How do muscles get reactivated?
The initial muscle exam allows us to compile a list of your inhibited muscles by utilizing precise, isolated, neurological muscle tests. We then start reactivating those muscles in an order specific to your personal pattern of muscular imbalances.
As your muscles are reactivated and their neurological connections become stronger, nearby muscles will often reactivate on their own without targeted treatment.
Approaching the body in this way means you usually get out of pain and back to your life faster than by using other therapies! It also means that we very rarely have to treat every muscle we find in that original evaluation, and we almost never need to treat the same muscle more than once, unless there is a significant new injury in the same area.
What can I expect during Muscle Activation treatment with New Leaf House Call Chiropractic?
The actual treatment uses a multi-pronged approach to target various sensory areas in the muscle that play a role in muscle inhibition. The main targets are the origin and insertion of the muscle and the tension regulation centers in the belly of the muscle. The spine will also be evaluated at the levels associated with that specific muscle and will receive a chiropractic adjustment if needed.
In the vast majority of cases, this is all that is necessary to reactivate the muscle. If the muscle still won’t activate, however, various points on the body will then be stimulated for each muscle pertaining to acupuncture meridians, lymphatic drainage, glands, organs, and blood flow and the muscle retested again.
We teach you muscle-specific exercises to do at home that will continue to strengthen the muscle-brain connection, help reset the brain’s default motion patterns, and recondition weak or atrophied muscles.
Once all my muscles are activated, what happens next?
Once all of your inhibited muscles have been treated, retested, and your body is balanced, your care moves into a maintenance phase. This consists of a regular chiropractic check-up and adjustment every 4-6 weeks. This ensures that the spine continues moving correctly, which, in turn, helps your muscles stay activated.
These visits also help determine how our team can help you plan and reach your next health and wellness goals. Eating a healthy and balanced diet, managing stress, getting adequate sleep, and staying physically active are all part of your maintenance plan, and important for keeping your muscles and joints working at their best!