#structural bodywork

The pictures are from a lecture on urinary incontinence and fascial restriction. Mesh is an imperfect solution. If it does not migrate, it does not solve the incontinence issue over 50% of the time. Kegels, which are still the standard recommendation, do not solve the underlying cause. Manual therapy has been shown to be the best treatment. But, medically they continue to suggest drugs, surgery, and kegels.

This entire Fascial Congress conference has been so validating for everything we teach in SMRT classes and everything we do as SMRT therapists. Throughout my 30 years, I have consistently heard from female clients and students that the external work we do with SMRT stopped their leaking, gave them more bladder control, gave them more confidence, and gave them their life back.

This particular speaker said that she finds that the issue in the pelvis is most often coming from the lower leg and foot because of fascial connections. I cannot explain to you how many times I have said this! As MTs, we want hips classes, but if you truly want to balance the hips, work the lower legs and feet! It reminds me of a therapist in a lower extremities class I was teaching in Maryland years ago. The lower leg SMRT work coupled with the thigh SMRT work stopped a leaking problem she had had for 25 years since giving birth to her son.

I am typically quiet about the extent of what we can do with SMRT. But, right now I want to scream it from the rooftops. We, all of us who use SMRT, have helped so many people with this amazing modality that changes fascia, muscle, joint alignment, and autonomic nervous system balance. And, the speakers, manual therapists, researchers, and doctors here speak what I have known for decades and validate the work I have been doing and teaching for decades. It feels fantastic!

The Value of Visualization in Correcting Motor Control Patterns

Restoring Movement Intelligence Pt 2:

How can we heal what we can't feel?

The ways we move, stand, sit, turn, are strategies learned and stored in the Cerebellum. If we stop moving due to a whiplash or broken bone, the body thinks we don't want that area to be moving. So it creates more dense tissue quality, that can feel dehydrated and rigid, more like fascia, less like muscle, more like scar.

The new default coordination/‘work-around’ in the area will bypass that muscle. Some other muscle will take over and become the default strategy for approximating the use of that muscle (like tucking your chin, leading with your jaw, or looking with your eyes while you turn your neck). These compensation patterns prove insufficient or result in secondary pathology, because they are doing a job they are not designed for. The neck goes rigid and loses the ability to move at all in certain directions.

When I ask my client to turn left at C2 using Obliquus Capitis Inferior, they tuck their chin to lock the upper neck in flexion, using Longus Colli to stabilize the neck so it able to turn left, but from lower down. They cannot tell where they are moving from.

NMR is the fast track to changing default coping strategies that have arrived at a point of unconsciousness or failure. It’s ability to do accurate assessment and open up proprioceptive awareness of specific dysfunctions helps the body to self correct. This should be done before conditioning muscles to rehabilitate any dysfunctional joint.

Muscle Testing is NOT a test of strength. When we use Manual Muscle Testing we are looking to establish connections, the ability to respond. We are looking to expand and restore Movement Intelligence to the proprioceptive nervous system.

Vernon Brooks in “The Hierarchy of Motor Control” states that passive ROM and imagined movement do not provide for learning in the motor control center. Since the writing of his book however, studies in Russia, done during the education of skilled movement in performance athletes, have shown that motor learning CAN be affected by visualization. Now these methods are in common practice among performance athletes.

The initiative to learning new movement comes first from movement intention, the desire to do something, such as learning to walk for a baby. Whether this is driven by the limbic or survival system or by desire, the end point is the same, although movements learned involving limbic activation are imprinted more quickly than rote learning and resist change even after the initial threat is gone.

Muscle testing reveals functional problems to the client's proprioceptive feedback system. For the first time, the body may become aware of missing muscles on the map. For instance, Longus Colli is facilitated and the neck locked straight. Bi-lateral SCMs for forward translation are inhibited. Passive ROM and tissue manipulation is not as educational as MMT to make the weakness conscious, followed by client assisted coached movement using new muscle coordination. Finally and ideally, the client would perform those movements themselves, anchoring in the certainty through felt sense that the muscle can function again.

-Jocelyn Olivier

Deep Massage Society

THIRTEEN RULES OF MASSAGE