Muscle Activation
Your brain is continually assessing your body for stability and balance.
When your brain recognizes instability it protects your balance by causing stronger muscles to compensate for the less engaged ones –and by limiting mobility and range of motion. This becomes a vicious cycle.
The key, then, is to re-activate the muscles that are causing your brain to sense instability –the muscles that are not firing the way they should.
The goal is get the brain to recognize those muscles
so they become fully responsive again. M.A.T.
(Muscle Activation Techniques) does
exactly that. Combining MAT, with PT
and with fitness training is ideal.
Doing muscle strengthening exercises (without the benefit MAT or without knowing the proper, targeted exercises for very specific muscles) merely results in the non-activated muscles staying non-activated and causing the compensating muscles to do even more work.
Over time, the compensation patterns create altered alignment leading to joint instability and abnormal wear on the joint surfaces. You’ll eventually experience pain and osteoarthritis.
Osteoarthritis is usually correlated with aging, yet it does not have to occur.
