“Much more of the brain is devoted to movement than to language. Language is only a little thing sitting on top of this huge ocean of movement.” – Oliver Sacks
When it comes to moving your body, nothing happens until the brain says so. Every voluntary muscle movement comes from a signal in the motor control center of your brain, located in the cerebellum. This signal tells our muscles what to do and exactly how to do it, so accuracy and precision are particularly important here. And the body functions in groups, chains, and patterns rather than individual muscles in isolation, which only adds to the complexity of the message.
The message from the brain via the motor control center can change for many reasons. Our brain and body are particularly clever when it comes to keeping us moving. So if, for instance, an injury has occurred and we can’t use the usual protocol to perform a movement, our brain will devise a compensatory one. This is very useful for survival purposes, though the compensation is often not ideal for long-term use. But if our compensation pattern gets used often enough, it can become the ‘new normal’ in the MCC, and become permanent. And as stated before, compensations are marvelous stopgap measures, but don’t usually stand up well to long-term use. It’s like using a screw driver to hammer in a nail – yes, you can use it that way in the absence of a hammer, but it’s probably not going to be as effective or efficient, and since it wasn’t designed to be used that way, it’s probably going to break sooner than later.
The thing that makes these patterns difficult to find is that the whole operation is entirely unconscious, and the mind no longer sees them as compensations. We don’t really know something has altered until we notice a change in performance, or until something hurts. The important distinction to make here, and the one that is often misunderstood, is that what is causing the altered performance or pain-producing action is actually how the brain is communicating with your body. You could say that when you’re working out your body, you’re actually working out your brain, since nothing happens in the muscles until the brain says so.
So how is someone supposed to determine the nature of the pattern, let alone correct it to return to healthier functionality? This is where NKT comes in. Neurokinetic Therapy is a both a diagnostic and treatment modality that uses very simple muscle tests to determine functionality and relationships. It determines if the patterns from the MCC need alteration and provides easy correctives to reset the pattern to healthier functionality. This is an extremely valuable resource because if we don’t correct the dysfunction we may be inadvertently strengthening it. If we strengthen dysfunction we create further imbalance, and imbalance in the body leads to pain and injury.
Whether you’re looking to increase functionality or performance, or address pain and injury, NKT is an incredible resource to help you achieve your goals. Move smart!