Between limiting how well your body moves and feeling just plain uncomfortable, tight muscles rarely have anybody feeling happy.
But, did you know that almost every way of dealing with tight muscles doesn’t actually address the real reason for the tightness?
It’s true. Most ways of dealing with tight muscles just try to cover up the symptom of tightness and hope that will be enough to keep the tightness away.
Things like stretching, massage, foam rolling, various release techniques, trigger point therapies, fascia techniques, and more all focus on relieving the symptom, i.e. the muscle tightness itself.
But what if your tight muscles are actually purposeful? What if they are intentionally made tight to help your body?
Crazy as it may sound, this is 100% the case more times than not.
In fact, this line of thinking is true so often that we don’t even consider it NOT being the reason why you have tight muscles.
That’s right. In our view, tight muscles are absolutely purposeful and if you try to just loosen them up, you are actually doing more harm than good.
But why is this? And what might an alternative approach be?
It is simple really–tightening up your muscles is your body’s easiest way to compensate for other muscles that aren’t working well.
Your body is literally telling some muscles to work harder (i.e. tighten up) to make up for the fact that you have other muscles who aren’t able to do enough.
The result? You have some muscles that are working way too hard while others are asleep on the job. Try as you might to loosen up the tight ones, if you don’t wake up the sleeping ones, the tight ones will just keep tightening up.
The solution, then, is to figure out which muscles are metaphorically asleep and activate them to start working properly again. This is exactly what we do with Muscle Activation Techniques®, also known as MAT.
With MAT, we can identify which muscles within your body are asleep on the job and get them contracting and firing on all cylinders again.
Once your body realizes that its muscles are working correctly, it will automatically calm down the muscles that are tight.
It doesn’t matter whether it is tight calves, tight hamstrings, tight hip flexors, tight low back, tight shoulders, tight neck, or tightness anywhere else in your body; once your body learns how to contract and squeeze its underactive muscles, the overactive muscles will immediately loosen up.
And the best part about it is because this approach addresses the root cause of muscle tightness, the relief from tight muscles is much longer-lasting than traditional stretching, massage, or foam rolling techniques.
If you would like to experience MAT for yourself, we would love to see you at our studio, Muscle Activation Schaumburg, in Chicago’s northwest suburbs.
At Muscle Activation Schaumburg, we have been trained in the highest levels of MAT–including MATRx, MATRx2, MATRx Stim, MAT Athlete, and MAT Athlete2–and are the most highly-trained practitioners in the Chicagoland area.
To try out Muscle Activation Techniques® for yourself, click here to schedule your initial consultation and assessment.
We can’t wait to see you on our MAT table soon!
In strength and health,
Julie & Charlie