Exercise is very important for maintaining the health of your body; however, we are never taught to make sure the muscular system is working at 100% to provide you the best possible workout. This not only affects performance but, the strong muscles get stronger and the weak weaker only reinforcing muscular imbalances.

Most muscular treatments address tightness. Muscle Activation Technique (MAT) addresses, “Why are the muscles tight” or muscle weaknesses. Whenever we move, our brain and muscles are communicating to make it happen. It is not something we have to think about just like the beating of our heart. For reasons such as repetitive motion jobs, repetitive motion sports, trauma, stress, or injury, the communication between the brain and the muscle can get a glitch in it. This glitch or fault keeps the muscle from contracting on demand, in other words, the muscle is not in the game at 100%. When that happens other muscles have to come in to help take up the slack as the body has to make sure the joints maintain stability. When you feel tightness, this is what is happening. The body is protecting the joints, you have a decrease in range of motion. The body is in a protective state and compensating. The muscles that are helping can do this for awhile, but now they are doing their job plus helping the slacker muscles. Further compensation, further compensation and finally pain and or the loss of physical capabilities.

The great thing about MAT is its customized approach to each individual. Range of motion is evaluated to determine where to start working in the muscular system. Once that is determined, tests are performed on the individual muscles to see if they have lost contractile ability. If they have, a very specific force is applied to restore that muscle’s efficiency, re-activating that muscle. After re-activating, the muscle is retested to see if the contractibility has been restored. This checks and balance approach allows you to know if the muscle is back in the game at 100%.  As a result, your range of motion improves because the muscle that was helping the slacker can just go back to doing its own job. Doesn’t that make so much since? Address the cause/weakness, instead of the symptom/tightness.

Anyone of any age can benefit from MAT and the really exciting part is as you get your body out of the compensating cycle, it can actually become more resilient to do more and take more. We see this in our young athletes all the way to our 90 year olds. MAT helps you to perform at your peak from a position of strength no matter what your age.