What is Muscle Activation Therapy?

Muscle Activation Therapy is a newer treatment protocol in the chiropractic world. It has been around for almost 40 years and is used at the highest levels of competition in sports. Despite the significant impact it has had in athletics and the fact that it’s a great way to strengthen muscles naturally, it is still largely unknown in health care spaces.

We’ll dive deeper into how muscles turn off, what muscle activation therapy with our clinic looks like, and why we use it extensively in our practice.

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Types of Muscle Activation Therapies

First, let’s define the terms.

Muscle activation is a therapy that relies on manual, neurologically-based muscle testing to identify muscles that have been inhibited due to past disuse or injury, and restore them to their full and proper function. 

Or, to put it simply, muscle activation finds which of your muscles have been turned off and turns them back on again.

There are several different “brands” of muscle activation, including:

• Clinical Kinesiology
• Advanced Muscle Integration Technique (AMIT)
• Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT)
• And practitioners that practice under the generic name “muscle activation”

While each of these differ slightly in examination or treatment, they all aim to help weak muscles get strong again.

I am a chiropractor (yes, chiropractors work on muscles too!) and trained in Advanced Muscle Integration Technique (AMIT). Currently, I practice a more generic form of muscle activation to offer greater flexibility of assessment and care to better suit each patient’s unique needs.

At their most basic level, muscle activation therapies treat the main culprit behind a host of musculoskeletal issues: muscle inhibition.

How Do Muscles Turn Off?

Before we talk about how to activate muscles, we need to explain why they become inhibited (or turned off) in the first place.

Most people have experienced muscle inhibition in action but didn’t realize it at the time. Have you ever stepped on something sharp and felt your leg go weak and almost give out?

That sudden weakness is temporary muscle inhibition.

The feeling of something sharp driving into your foot shoots an urgent message up to the brain, where it is processed faster than the speed of conscious thought. The brain immediately responds by tripping the circuit breaker for muscle strength in the area where the urgent message originated. 

In short, the leg goes weak. It’s the body’s way of trying to prevent an injury when a tissue is overloaded or stressed. 

After minor pain like this, your strength returns immediately. But if the stress were more severe (say twisting your ankle) then temporary muscle inhibition can’t prevent injury. That kind of overload usually causes a sprain, strain, or break.

To prevent worse injury, the brain “turns off” the injured muscle. Putting it under long-term muscle inhibition gives it time to heal properly.

While that inhibited muscle is healing, your other muscles in the area develop a compensation pathway, such as a limp or different posture. This is why you can keep moving even though that muscle is out of commission.

With time, the brain should remove the inhibition and turn the fully healed muscle back on as if nothing ever happened.

Sometimes, however, the compensation pathway we used for the weeks during healing becomes so habitual and ingrained that the brain leaves the freshly healed muscle turned off.

This means it will stay weak, sore, and usually either tighter or looser than it should be.

As you can imagine, having many of your muscles turned off is a huge cause behind a lot of common musculoskeletal complaints.

So how do you get all your muscles turned back on and working as they should?

Muscle Activation therapy is the answer.

What Does Muscle Activation Therapy Look Like?

As mentioned earlier, at New Leaf Chiropractic we practice generic muscle activation. Practitioners of the other brands of muscle activation may do this process somewhat differently and get somewhat different results, but the overall process will likely be similar.

Let’s walk through the six main steps of Muscle Activation therapy as if we’re working with a patient and break down how it all works.

1. Manual Muscle Testing (MMT)

Most Muscle Activation therapies rely heavily on manual muscle testing, or MMT. MMT identifies which muscles are on or off by measuring their strength.

My goal when testing muscle strength is to never overpower the patient.

I want to meet your strength, not exceed it.

During the first exam I work with the patient to test each muscle, one by one. I apply force in the direction that best isolates the muscle’s movement, and the patient resists the force.

Muscles that hold strong under pressure are on and don’t need activation.

Inhibited muscles, however, are weak. Much of the time, inhibited muscles can’t stay strong under the force of even one finger pushing against them. They usually only work at 50% or less of their actual strength. 

(We know this because we occasionally use a handheld dynamometer to measure the maximum pounds of force a muscle gives before and after treatment.)

For example, an NFL linebacker I worked with once had a quad muscle in his thigh that would shake and collapse under 16 lbs of force, about the same weight as 2 gallons of milk. (I’ll share more about his results at the end.)

Once we identify an inhibited muscle through MMT, it’s time to reset the muscle-brain connection.

2. Reset Nerve Pathways

The actual treatment portion of Muscle Activation therapy starts by resetting the muscle’s nerve pathways. To do this, I apply manual pressure where the muscle tendon attaches to bone, as this is where the most nerve endings are.

So much sensory input at once overloads the nerves, causing that “circuit” to crash and reset.

Think of it like holding down the power button to restart your phone or laptop. Sometimes we have to reboot to fix a problem, install updates, or just help it run fast again.

Muscles work similarly!

3. Soft Tissue Manipulation

After the nerve pathway reset, I apply targeted massage to resolve issues within the muscle.

First, a lengthwise massage to help reset the tension cells in both the belly of the muscle and where the muscle attaches to the tendons.

This helps restore the muscle’s ideal tension as the default. Muscles that were too tight will loosen up, while muscles that were loose and flaccid now tighten up the slack.

Second, I’ll palpate the muscle looking for knots and trigger points. These occur when a group of muscle fibers are contracted for so long that they start to stick together in a clump and won’t allow the individual muscle fibers to move freely.

A common area for people to notice these types of knots are in the neck and shoulders, but they can exist in any muscle.

Massage alone may resolve these trigger points but sometimes other soft tissue techniques are needed, such as:

• Direct pressure over time
• Cross-fiber massage
• Cupping
• Instrument-assisted Scraping (IASTM)

These can also help break up scar tissue. Regardless of the method, the goal is to allow the whole muscle to move freely again. 

Ideally, once soft tissue manipulation is complete I can move on to checking the joints. But occasionally, muscles need one more step.

4. Reflex Points

A small percentage of muscles are disconnected from the brain for so long that the nerve reset isn’t enough to reactivate it. To bring the brain’s attention back to the ignored muscle, I again use manual pressure to stimulate the muscle and various reflex points throughout the body.

These reflex points relate to the neurovascular and neurolymphatic systems, organs, glands, and even some acupuncture points. They can be quite a distance from the target muscle and may seem to be unrelated. However, I have seen this referral phenomenon occur in many patients where their muscle and joint pain was actually caused by injury or disease in a different body system, organ, or gland.

Once the ailment was treated (often through nutrition, supplementation, or traditional medicine), their affected muscles could hold strong again.

The reflex points don’t need attention for most muscles, or even most patients. Due to this, I only treat the reflex points when a muscle won’t stay strong after treatment.

5. Joint Manipulation and Mobilization

The last part of treatment covers checking your joints. I am a chiropractor after all!

I check the joints that the target muscle controls. (For example, if I activated a bicep muscle, I’ll check the elbow.) I also check the spinal joints surrounding the nerves that innervate the target muscle. 

Any restricted joints receive mobilization or adjustments, as needed.

At this point the joints should be moving smoothly, setting up the newly reactivated muscle for success right from the start.

6. Re-testing

Now it’s time to see if this all worked!

After the muscle is fully treated, I test it in the same position that we tested it in before to see if strength was restored. Again, meeting your strength rather than exceeding it.

In most cases, the strength will already have doubled or even tripled. All after only the 5-10 minutes it took to treat the muscle.

If you recall the NFL linebacker I mentioned earlier, his quad muscle went from collapsing at 16 lbs to strong and steady at over 80 lbs. That’s 5 times the original maximum force!

This tends to be a long-lasting effect. Muscles typically only need to be treated once unless there is another significant injury, or if the patient stops using the muscle completely for a significant period of time.

Since activation works so well, patients can relatively quickly work through their problem areas, get stronger and feel better, then move on with their lives!

That’s why I love muscle activation and share it with everyone I treat. You should be able to feel better in a short amount of time without super frequent adjustments for the rest of your life.

A quarterly check-in can help with any small tweaks to help you feel your best and keep you moving towards your health goals.

Why Do You Practice Muscle Activation?

When I first heard of muscle activation I wondered if this therapy was just like all the other “out there” treatments. You know the ones—where only the person that invented it can actually do the method, and they make a living selling training courses to other docs, but the trainees never get the same great results as the original practitioner.

Since training in muscle activation in 2020, I can tell you now that this method changes patients’ lives. My first encounters with muscle activation more than surprised me—they completely changed the way I practice.

Anyone who is adequately trained in the method is capable of getting great results with it. 

It’s not some miracle solution for every complaint, but it does fill a huge gap in musculoskeletal care. It quickly boosts patients past their plateaus and helps them stay stable without repeatedly extending their care plan.

Chiropractors and PTs alike know just how frustrating it is to have a patient that just can’t progress anymore, even though they still don’t feel well.

Not to mention extremely frustrating for the patient!

As a chiropractor, my philosophy is that patients shouldn’t need weekly adjustments to feel well.

Muscle activation is an excellent option for helping these patients move past their plateaus and on to real progress.

Muscle Activation Therapy Summary

Muscle Activation has been around for decades but is not yet widely practiced in the general populace. It tends to have profound positive impacts on patient healing and strength.

Our goal is to bring it to the people of North Idaho and Eastern Washington because it works quickly, is effective for most patients, and can help reduce the need for frequent musculoskeletal care.

You may be wondering if Muscle Activation replaces other therapies like chiropractic, physical therapy, massage therapy, etc.

In my practice, I’ve seen nothing but positive results from adding muscle activation to these other treatments. It can supercharge muscles to boost patients past plateaus they’ve been stuck on for years, and help them see actual progress toward their health goals again.

PTs and LMTs that have already been treating our patients before muscle activation are thrilled when treatment with us allows the patient to blow past their long-standing progress markers. They remark on the sudden improvements in range of motion, strength, and functional outcomes, or how their typical tense areas are no longer an issue.

If you’re wondering how muscle activation therapy could work for you, I’m available to discuss your case and talk through how it may be a good fit for your situation—and if it isn’t, I’ll get you pointed in the right direction with a referral.

Schedule a free Discovery Call below through our online booking site Jane, or head over to the Contact page to send me an email.