What is Muscle Testing?
Muscle testing is carried out at initial consultation and in on-going treatments to check the output of major muscles because any muscle weakness or inhibited muscle will affect your movement, performance, robustness and ability to avoid injury.
Messages sent to and from the central nervous system control our muscle tone. Within every muscle spindle nerve endings detect the level of tension in the muscle fibres telling the brain the length of each muscle. This information input to the central nervous system, along with information received from mechanoreceptors in each joint, provides the brain with a complete picture of body position and helps ensure correct messages can be sent back out via the nervous system for muscles to contract, controlling your every movement accurately, helping to prevent you falling over, turning your ankle or dislocating your knee. Even when we are resting, every muscle fibre is receiving approximately 50 messages per second!
Clinical skills and muscle testing allow us to examine muscle tone and strength, detect weaknesses and identify the treatment needed to correct them. The aim is to make muscles work more effectively, in turn helping to protect your joints and make you more robust.
