Muscle Activation and Performance
By Christopher Chilelli, MATcs

What if I were to tell you that in the last decade a revolutionary form of neuromuscular bodywork had emerged, one that offered a wholly different perspective on the body, on exercise, and on sport performance? What if I added that this technique had shown so much promise that it had quickly become a go-to tool for virtually every major sports organization in North America, for individual athletes, and for elite-level dancers and acrobats. What if this technique could offer you new pathways to increased flexibility, strength, and resistance to injury?

Well that system exists. It’s called Muscle Activation TechniquesTM and it was developed by Greg Roskopf, a strength coach and consultant to the Denver Broncos, Utah Jazz, and countless others. Since its introduction, MAT has caught the interest of both the top athletes and top manual therapists worldwide – and for good reason. The methodology used in Muscle Activation has potential to transform our understanding of the body and how we condition for strength, rehabilitation and performance.

It works like this. Every physical activity you perform with your body - from the most mundane to the most athletic – depends absolutely on force production from the muscular system. If you didn’t know already, your muscles collectively represent the most sophisticated motor system known to mankind. Using only an ability to generate tension, they nonetheless manage an incredible and complex range of tasks; from the coordinated precision of playing a piano to the raw strength and power of an Olympic lift. And they accomplish all this while at the same time holding your joints together, contracting rhythmically to return blood to the heart, and maintaining your ability to breathe. All these tasks are controlled entirely by a nervous system that evolved in large measure to accommodate them. More than 70% of your brain is involved in some way with motor function, areas that also play roles in memory formation and retrieval, emotions, special understanding, and metabolism. Muscle is some pretty intense stuff!

Here’s the thing: that force production discussed above, your muscular system’s motor output, is heavily dependent on sensory input. This should make perfect sense. Imagine someone blindfolded you and then asked you to run down a crowded hallway. While the result might be amusing to anyone watching, you certainly wouldn’t get far. Your brain requires visual information in order to execute movement efficiently. It requires other sensory information as well.

And that’s where you muscular system comes in. Muscles, like you ears or nose, are sensory organs as much they are components to a tension generating system. Through tiny, intermittent contractions and various other pathways muscle ‘tells’ your brain all sorts of information about the position of your limbs and joints in space, the tension or pressure on different areas, or the relative length of individual muscles themselves. The brain in turn uses this information, along with conscious impulses from you, to efficiently coordinate muscular contractions based on demand. It’s an elegant arrangement of feedback and control.

However, perhaps because of its complexity, this arrangement is subject to interruption. Just as alcohol can impair your vision, or a tough cold will alter taste and smell, so to can stresses to your muscular system in the form of poor diet, overuse, fatigue, or injury compromise muscle’s ability to sense. Lacking in sensory resources, your brain does what the family fallen on hard times does: it cuts back. Anyone who has explored their own body even a little has experienced this at some point. Under duress, your brain will not allow you such costly indulgences like exerting your maximal effort, or sustaining an effort for long periods. That precise coordination of muscular contraction can dull if need be, with detrimental results. Most easy to observe, the end-range positions of joints – which are the most taxing positions to control neurologically – will decrease, the brain ‘tightening’ muscles to prevent you from visiting them. In other words, you lose flexibility.
Our traditional approach to bodily ‘tightness,’ and the deficits in performance it can cause has involved various forms of stretching and little else. But ‘stretching’ is not without risk. A mountain of recent research has shown that taking joints past their currently available range has consequences beyond temporarily increased range of motion and a feeling of ‘release.’ Many forms of stretching can actually weaken muscle tissue. And years of aggressive stretching can destabilize the body’s joints, leading to further deficits in performance – not to mention injury. This is not to say that stretching is somehow bad, just that we must apply it strategically.

What Muscle Activation TechniquesTM can do, and with an almost singular effectiveness, is to identify and restore areas within the muscular system where sensory – and as a result motor – function has been compromised. If that still sounds like gibberish, know that the immediate result usually involves significant increases in joint range of motion, increased comfort and ease of movement, and improved performance in sport or activity – and that those changes last.

Using range of motion as a guiding tool, over a period of weeks and months certified MAT specialists can hone in on problematic motions and positions and then employ a number of manual techniques to reintroduce appropriate connections with the brain – all without aggressive joint manipulation. This minimally disruptive ability, unique to Muscle Activation, has made it an indispensible adjunct to both rehabilitation and sport conditioning. Regular MAT enhances the results that come from your training efforts and, by extension, everything you do.

Christopher Chilelli is the owner of Logic Performance Systems, a NYC based health services and education company, specialized in performance consulting, personal training, and Muscle Activation TechniquesTM.
www.logicfit.com
www.mechanicsinmotion.com
chris@logicfit.com