THE BENEFITS OF MUSCULAR HEALTH — Our movement is what makes us able to have fun, to laugh, to dance, to achieve our athletic goals, to escape from danger, just to name a few. Our movement comes from a system of contraction units (muscles), attached to bone points, that can pull bones together on command (from motor nerve signals), and the style of this movement is defined by how these bones are connected (via the joints). In a healthy state, muscles allow free movement with strength and control. Should our muscles lose some health, then their ability to move is compromised, and we feel restricted in movement and can also feel pain with movement.
The importance of Ischemic muscle tissue release: > > Returning to Maximum Power and restoring full Range Of Motion [ROM] —
The most common way that muscles lose health is through a patho-physiologic process called ischemia. Most folks are familiar with muscle knots, a common result of ischemia. Muscle knots are a nuisance, for sure, are even painful at times, but more important is that they reduce muscle strength and distort the operating function of the muscle. Simple strength training will not return this loss of strength, and this distorted muscle function can put joints, ligaments, and tendons at risk of injury. What can we do?
It helps to understand how these knots form and how to release them. In basic terms, all muscles have a contraction function, in fact this is the only functional action muscles have: they are either “ON” , contracted, or “OFF”, relaxed. Healthy muscles have immediate responses as the ON-OFF motor nerve signals change, but knotted muscle (ischemic muscle) has lost some of the “relax” response. Localized chronic muscle contractions (knots) thus form and the agonist-antagonist muscle pair soon develops a tension state that both restricts ROM and strains the skeletal joint tissues. As this ischemic condition develops, significant loss of overall muscle strength can develop, along with the development of significant stiffness.
Therapies that really help: ORTHOPEDIC MASSAGE, ZEN BODYTHERAPY, NEUROMUSCULAR THERAPY
Effective treatments for muscular-skeletal improvement must release this ischemic soft tissue and then realign the muscle and fascial fibers. Treatments that fail to do both may be effective in the short term yet may not produce lasting results. Neuromuscular Therapy is an example of an excellent therapy for the release of ischemic muscle tissue but it is one that is best combined with a fascial alignment technique for lasting results. The Zen Bodytherapy and Orthopedic Massage programs both incorporate ischemic release plus use specific body planes of movement techniques that create a solid co-operating system of muscle-fascia-skeleton alignment for lasting musculoskeletal movement and performance, and simply good pain-free living.
All of our life activities benefit from ease of movement, plus a sense of strength and balance, and this is often more easily obtained than is widely known. Please give a call if you would like to find out more.
Look for a follow-up blog post where I will expand this discussion into the Fascia-Muscle relationship and how we can use this to restore/improve muscle strength and function, and what we can do to keep it. I think you will find it interesting.