The Integra Blog

How Can Muscle Activation Techniques Help Your Yoga Practice?

I recently posted a link to a NY Times article onto the Integra Facebook Page entitled: “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”

Away from the rare injuries that have occurred from potentially dangerous practitioners, such as stroke, the article detailed the potential injuries that can occur from pursuing a mode of exercise that may not be physically suited to most of our population:

Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems.

When it comes to health and fitness, the majority of people strongly believe that more is better; if running 1 mile an be beneficial to us, then running 10 miles must be more; if touching your toes is beneficial, then putting my head between my knees, surely, must be even better?

I have been treating yoga practitioners for many years now, who have come to me with common goals:

• Reducing joint and muscle pain (the most common areas have been in the knees, hips and shoulders),
• Improving the ability to hold postures for longer,
• Increasing the available range of motion in a joint, and
• Improving recovery time and/or physical stresses on the body allowing for more practice time

So how can Muscle Activation Techniques help your yoga practice?

What is MAT?

MAT (Muscle Activation Techniques) is a system designed to evaluate and treat joint and muscular imbalances. It is a systematic approach to the evaluation and treatment of the bio-mechanical relationships relating to pain, injury and decreased performance.

MAT for Yoga?

MAT can complement your current practice by ensuring that your joint and muscular system is working optimally.

The signs and symptoms of joint and muscle imbalances include:

• Increased muscle tightness
• Decreased range of motion at a joint
• Decreased strength and endurance within certain muscles
• Inability to hold positions on one side versus the other
• Increased potential for joint and/or muscle pain

If I have muscle tightness or decreased range of motion, why should I not just stretch?

Muscle tightness is a symptom of joint and muscle imbalances. By stretching a tight muscle we may be able to temporariliy affect the length of this muscle - but at what cost? And won’t the muscle revert to the previous tightness if you do not focus on the root cause? We need to find out: why are your muscles becoming tight?

Why Are You Tight?

It boils down to one key point: joint control

Our joints are controlled by the following tissues in the body:

• 1. contractile tissues - muscles
• 2. non-contractile tissues - ligaments, joint capsules, etc
• 3. structural elements - bones, etc

Our Central Nervous System (CNS) has control over just one tissue in the body, muscle. If muscle inhibition is present, your CNS will effectively reduce the range that your joint will move through, to prevent joint and ligament damage and increase the tension on the remaining muscles to increase the stability of a joint.

Muscle tightness is a byproduct of muscle inhibition.

So rather than stretch, or release a protective mechanism put in place by the CNS, we want to locate and treat the muscle(s) that are not contributing to the control of a joint: the muscles that are inhibited.

How does MAT work?

Muscle Activation techniques is a system designed to analyse, test and correct the muscular system. By locating and then treating the muscles that are inhibited, we can start to rectify the underlying causes of muscle tightness, decreased range of motion and joint and muscle pain.

How does MAT improve performance?

Within each position and movement you perform, you have access to a series of muscles to perform that given task.

If one or more of these muscles are inhibited, the remaining muscles will have to work harder to compensate for these inhibitied muscles which in turn significantly decreases your potential performance.

Using MAT, we can systematically find, then treat the underlying cause of muscle imbalances, doing so can improve your performance during your practice including:

• Decreased muscle tightness
• Increased range of motion at a joint
• Increased strength and endurance within certain muscles
• Improved ability to hold and maintain postures
• Decreased potential for joint and/or muscle pain