What is Muscle Activation?
Muscle Activation Techniques™ are an emerging form of manual bodywork developed by Greg Roskopf, a biomechanics consultant to the Denver Broncos, Utah Jazz, and others.
To hear Greg tell it, MAT was born out of frustration. Working as an elite strength coach for various collegiate and professional sports organizations, he was perplexed that the highly structured conditioning programs he was using would work exactly as they should for some athletes, but for others these programs would fail to generate the desired results or, worse, negatively impact performance.
Muscle Activation was the solution. Radically different than traditional massage and other manual therapies, MAT provides a systematic method of checks and balances with which to assess and ‘correct’ what can be defined broadly as imbalances within the musculature. It’s these muscle ‘imbalances’ that can lead to pain, injury, and reduced performance.
Most disciplines of the body are overly concerned with muscle tightness. Swedish and Tai massage, Active Release, myofascial release, trigger point, etc; all these techniques seek to identify areas of pain and/or tightness in the body and then ‘release’ those areas through various methods. Leaving aside the larger questions of what exactly the terms ‘tightness’ and ‘release’ even mean, how is it that these areas became tight in the first place?
This is a central tenet to the Muscle Activation Techniques™ process: the view that muscular tightness is of secondary importance to – in fact caused by – neurological weakness or inhibition.
The scientific principles behind MAT.
All physical activity – from sport to exercise to dance – is ultimately about force production. The human body generates force through our muscles, more specifically; through a complexly organized neuro-muscular-skeletal system. In this system force production depends heavily on sensory input. The strength your muscles can generate is based directly on the mechanical information available to the nervous system. Your muscles act like a giant sensory organ, constantly beaming vital information to the brain about their length, tension, and position in space through tiny contractions and signals occurring thousands of times per second. For a variety of reasons aspects of this exquisite feedback system can get interrupted by injury, pain, inflammation, dietary deficiency, and repeated stresses (both physical and emotional). In this circumstance, with sensory information to the brain impeded, so too is the brain’s ability to accurately produce and respond to force. The muscle or group of muscles affected is said to be inhibited.
Muscle Activation Techniques™ are the only known method for identifying and modifying this muscular inhibition, thus preparing the body for force. This improved relationship with force produces demonstrable increases in strength, range of motion, and comfort. MAT does not treat pain or injury directly. It does not represent a form of therapy. However, by influencing underlying joint mechanics and muscular imbalances MAT serves as a useful adjunct to traditional physical therapy, massage, and acupuncture.
What does MAT address exactly? What’s a muscle spindle anyway?
To understand exactly how Muscle Activation works to improve the neuromuscular system, you first need to understand how muscle works in sensation. Most of us are at least a little familiar with how muscles work to produce force. Without getting into too much technical detail, we know that muscle responds to force demands by contracting; shortening to move or stabilize the bones to which it attaches. But how does the body decide how much tension to allow the muscle to generate? Well, through various specialized cells, the muscle tells the brain how much it needs. Lets look at one of them.
Muscle spindles are specialized sensory cells that run parallel to your muscle fibers. They play a vital role in muscular contraction because they communicate with the nervous system information about a muscles length and its rate of length change. The brain needs this information in order to decide the amount of tension it will allow a muscle to develop.
You can think of the nerves serving the muscular system like you would the electrical wiring for a house or building. The nerves are the wiring and the muscles themselves are like the outlets and switches in the walls. In a similar way to how electrical wiring has a positive and a negative feed, the muscles in our analogy have two types of wiring. The alpha motor neuron or nerve innervates (wires to) the contractile elements of the muscle fibers themselves, sending signals that tell these fibers to contract or relax. Meanwhile, the gamma motor neuron innervates those spindles within the muscle. (Remember these are the fibers that tell nervous system how long a muscle is and how fast or slow it’s changing in length)
Normally during a muscular contraction both of these motor nerves go to work. The alpha motor nerve signals the muscle to contract and while it does, the gamma motor nerve keeps the spindles ‘primed’ so that they can send information back to the brain on how long the muscle is and how quickly (or slowly) that length is changing. Then, based on the information it’s receiving from the muscle spindles, the nervous system can reliably signal the contractile fibers in the muscle further through the alpha motor nerves. This whole system of feedback and control is referred to as the alpha/gamma motor loop.
So far, so good. But things don’t always go so smoothly. This feedback system (the entire nervous system in fact) is highly plastic and dynamically maintained. The brain can modify it as it deems necessary. Based on demand, the nervous system can ramp down the signals it gets from the muscle spindles, thus inhibiting tension generation. It’s like the dimmer switches getting turned down in our house analogy. This can occur as a result of injury or pain, but the exact mechanisms are still not fully understood.
So at this point, you may be forgiven for thinking, ‘Why would the brain inhibit a muscle’s ability to contract? And didn’t you say it’s this inhibition stuff that leads to pain and injury in the first place?’
I know it’s confusing, but keep in mind that your brain is down-regulating muscle contraction all the time. In fact, muscle inhibition is the primary way we control our movements. It’s by this mechanism that the human hand, for instance, can produce the finite control and precision it needs. Were all the muscles in your body to contract with their maximum available force they would tear themselves from the bone. Only in situations of extremely high stress will the body to allow this to happen. You may have heard the story about a housewife accidentally backing over her child with a car and then, in a surge of adrenaline, somehow lifting the car to rescue the child. This has actually happened. It makes a great local news story, but they usually don’t tell you the part where the housewife needs to be treated for multiple muscle tears and soft tissue injuries afterward.
It’s when the body loses the ability or otherwise fails to re-up-regulate muscle contraction (turn the dimmer switch back up) that we run into problems. Let me present you with a hypothetical situation to further illustrate this. Imagine you suffer an injury like a pulled muscle or sprained ligament. Let’s say the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) of the knee joint gets sprained. In this situation the nervous system goes into damage control. The ACL serves as a mechanical restraint against certain joint motions in the knee. If that doesn’t make any sense, you just need to know that with it sprained or ruptured, full extension or straightening of the knee will be a position of high vulnerability to the joint. In order not to make this sprain any worse, the nervous system will command certain muscles around the injury (the hamstrings and other knee flexors) to tighten up, working like an internal splint to prevent the potentially problematic joint position. At the same time it inhibits the muscles that would pull you into that problematic position in the first place (the Quadriceps) as a further protective measure. This arrangement is temporary, of course. It’s based on the immediate needs of protecting the knee joint. Given some rest and recovery and with a little healing, the nervous system can adjust things back to a more optimal state, with proper alpha/gamma feedback in place.
But things do not always go so smoothly and are rarely as simple. The nervous system responds on a more regular basis to bodily circumstances far more subtle and numerous; a small pull here, over-exertion there, sitting for an extended period one day, poor water intake the next. The sometimes contradictory neural adjustments made to allow for these circumstances pile on top of one another, creating patterns of inhibition. Add an injury like an ACL tear to this mix and the body might be unable to get things back to an ideal firing order. The resulting compensations in turn cause further inflammation, pain, and injury. As this advances, it is referred to as the cumulative injury cycle.
This is where Muscle Activation Techniques™ comes in. By evaluating and then enhancing the sensory capability of muscles – the ability of those muscle spindles to talk with the brain and spinal cord – MAT can interrupt this cycle, restoring proper contraction patterns and healthy joint mechanics.
Is MAT a form of physical therapy? Are MAT practitioners licensed?
No. Muscle Activation is different from physical therapy in several key respects. Your physical therapist has a host of responsibilities and skill-sets outside of an MAT practitioner’s scope of practice. Therapists are licensed to diagnose and treat injury, assess joint stability and health, as well as manage pain. Muscle activation is designed to simply as a means to assess and improve communication in the neuromuscular system. Any pain reduction or injury healing is an ancillary benefit, but outside of an MAT specialist scope.
That said, there are points of overlap. Both physical therapists and muscle activation specialists can ethically engage in efforts to prevent injury and promote health as well as consult and educate the public. There are also several MAT specialists practicing other modalities such as physical therapy, chiropractic, and personal training
Currently MAT practitioners, like most exercise professionals, are not required to pass any state or national licensing exam. However, becoming certified to use MAT requires attending a year long internship program that involves over 200 hours of class time and more than 300 of outside practice before taking a 2-day practical and written exam. Annual continuing education is mandatory in order to remain certified.
You can learn more at www.muscleactivation.com
Who can benefit from Muscle Activation Techniques™?
Any healthy individual can benefit from Muscle Activation Techniques™.
It’s easy to get distracted by the physiological benefits of exercise. We notice when muscles increase in size or when our time improves in a mile run. But training that is physiologically beneficial in one obvious respect may wreak havoc on our body’s less obvious neurological abilities to sense information and control joints. Health or performance goals in the short term can undermine our long-term ability. Evaluation through MAT reveals your body’s tolerances to force (i.e. exercise) and as a result it provides far more precise guidance with respect to training choices than have previously been available. MAT improves flexibility and control of joint motion, helping enhance the mechanisms that underlie all physical activity so that joint mechanics and their long-term health aren’t sacrificed for other goals.
The above features have made Muscle Activation Techniques™ popular in professional sports, especially football, basketball, and mixed martial arts, but also in track and field, dance and acrobatics. In the more general population, MAT can be indispensable where injury is a concern or to the continued performance of the amateur athlete.
So what’s the process?
There are four aspects to Muscle Activation Technique: a comprehensive range of motion evaluation, a specialized form of muscle testing, a manual treatment or palpation, and a series of isometric muscle contractions.
While we can’t go into more detail here, if you’d like to learn more about the specifics of Muscle Activation Techniques™, refer to the MAT website (muscleactivation.com) or call Logic Performance @(646) 416-1815. We’d be happy to explain the process in further detail.
How long does MAT take to work?
The extent and frequency of MAT necessary will vary based on the person and their goals. One of the major appeals of MAT is how rapidly and obviously it can improve range of motion and comfort. But like exercise, it doesn’t work very well if you just do it once. Effective application of Muscle Activation may need only a few sessions or regular sessions over months or years. In either case, MAT can be one of the most powerful tools you apply to you physical well-being. Contact Logic today to learn more or to schedule your session for Muscle Activation Techniques™.
646-416-1815