The human body truly is an artistic masterpiece. The bits and pieces that make up our physical selves can feel beyond an understanding. We are all so incredibly different and therefore function uniquely and independently.
One of Greg Roskopf's famous quotes is, "The integrated system is only as good as the function of its isolated parts". What does he mean by this? How does this fit within the Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®) methodology?
Think of all the complex activities within your body that help you thrive. You are full of individual systems, each with its own task, organs that generate energy or dispose waste, and tissues that create movement. Every segment has an important impact on how you feel and function throughout each day — each segment influencing and affecting one another.
Let's discuss the muscular system and the brain, but not in the way you are used to. We are going to look at how the muscular system affects brain activity.
Greg Roskopf, founder and developer of Muscle Activation Techniques, had a traumatic brain injury a couple years ago due to a car accident.
As Greg worked to recover from his brain injury, he realized that a component of his symptoms seemed to correlate with the status of his neuromuscular system. He began to notice that when his muscular system was functioning efficiently, following an MAT treatment, the symptoms that elated to the head injury would decrease.
Over time, Greg was able to correlate the relationship between muscle function and brain activity. He has identified the correlation between the efficiency of the neuromuscular system and the reduction in inflammation throughout the body. By receiving MAT on a regular basis following his traumatic brain injury, it had an incredibly positive impact on his overall recovery.
Due to his personal experience with dealing with a traumatic brain injury, Greg began to work with a group of Doctors that specialize in working with patients that have experienced traumatic brain injuries or concussions. Through their work together they have been able to monitor brain wave activity and have been able to measure the relationship between neuromuscular function and its impact on brain wave activity.
The findings pre and post MAT sessions were beyond anything that these brain specialists had seen before. The numbers that he was achieving were so impressive that the correlation shows that when muscles are contracting efficiently, it can have a positive impact on brain wave activity. This brain group that Greg is working with noted that through the MAT® treatments Greg was able to achieve marks (brain feedback) in an hour of MAT that could take months to achieve through various forms of neurofeedback.
Given the findings of Greg's experience, the interest in taking a deep dive into the correlation between the muscular system and its effect on brain recovery and brain activity has increased significantly. Greg is presently looking at combining efforts with the Brain group and looking to perform in-depth studies in order to show how neuromuscular function positively impacts brain activity.
In the article from The Athletic titled Infrared Saunas, DNA Testing for Diet, and MAT: Are Baseball's one-percenters paying for science, or pseudo-science?:
"'Unfortunately, I had a traumatic brain injury and have had to undergo testing and now I’ve been able to show, with brain wave monitoring, that improving muscular function can change my brain wave activity,' Roskopf said, seemingly welcoming more advanced study, as long as the MAT is performed by trained practitioners and if the study understands that it can’t, for instance, group all people with hip pain together.
'We could have ten people with hip pain, and they could all have different reasons for the pain,' Roskopf said. 'The whole idea with MAT is that everything is interrelated — the muscular dysfunction could be far away from the pain. With each person, the parameters are different. It’s hard to run controlled studies for that reason.'"
So what's next? We will be publishing an interview soon with Greg Roskopf and Charlie Cates, an MATRx® practitioner and multiple-level MAT instructor, discussing this very topic. Stay tuned!
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