Back To Par

Image courtesy of dailygalaxy.com

When I was first introduced to Muscle Activation Techniques™, one thing that stood out to me in my mind was the intent of the modality.  I saw it as a tool to, in a sense, get the client's body back to par or back to the way it could work under circumstances that are free from pathologies or structural deformities and are within the person's threshold to tolerate stress.  In reality, MAT is more trying to give the brain more options regarding what it has available to work with to produce specific motions and/or maintain specific positions, which I suppose may be seen as getting the body back to par.

Coming from a sports performance background, this was a drastically different idea than what had always been proposed to me. Previously, par had not been good enough. You had to train to be better than that. Suddenly, it seemed like par was what almost every person was failing to get to.  While the ability of contractile tissues to generate tension may have improved through the sports performance type of training, I'm not sure how much it was doing in terms of improving the ability of tissues* that were in a deficit regarding their ability to send enough afferent signal so as to have the opportunity to generate tension when needed.  Rather, this training may have just been improving the tension generation capability of the contractile tissues that were already working well, so any deficit of other tissues that was present to begin with may have remained.Perhaps a better way of improving the way the body functions and subsequently the way it performs may be to, at some point in the progression, just try to get the body closer to par, meaning having more of its options available for motion production and position control at a given point in time, and then improving upon what all of those options can do instead of taking a more limited number of options that are already working well and trying to build something bigger and better off of those.

If you had a building and wanted to make it bigger, would you just add more new structure to the top of it without going back and reinforcing all of the weak points in the current structure?

Inter­ested in find­ing out more? Check out the “Mus­cle Acti­va­tion Tech­niques™” page.

Inter­ested in set­ting up an assess­ment time or dis­cussing this sub­ject fur­ther? E-mail Char­lie at charlie@selfmadefitness.com.

Your body.  Your training.

Want to use this arti­cle in your blog, newslet­ter, or other plat­form?  You can, but be sure to include all of the bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion found in the yel­low box below!

*muscle fibers and their associated muscle spindles