exercise professional

What makes a Muscle Activation Techniques™ practitioner unique?

When people think of muscles, they usually don’t immediately think of a Muscle Activation Techniques™ (MAT™) practitioner, but they should.  Similar to how somebody might think of a dentist after hearing “teeth”, or a chiropractor after hearing “back” or “spine”, Muscle Activation Techniques™ may one day have that same relationship when somebody hears “muscle”.  For the time being, though, that typically isn’t the case, and here’s why — many people aren’t sure of 1) what MAT™ is, and 2) what makes MAT™ unique.  In that case, let’s discuss both of these. 

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By Charlie Cates, ago

The Physiological and Mechanical Tradeoff

Check out this snippet from Charlie’s most recent post on FitnessProfessionalOnline.com, titled “The Physiological and Mechanical Tradeoff“!

“As a personal trainer, one of the difficulties I often run into is trying to balance what a client can do with what they want to do.  Often times these situations will look like this:

Client: “I want to build my glutes.”

Me: “Okay, let’s add in some lunges today.”

Client: (During the first set) “Ouch, this is bothering my knee.”

I call this dilemma the physiological/mechanical tradeoff.  It’s a tradeoff because, as personal trainers, we know how we want to challenge our clients’ physiology, but we need to be able to do so within the mechanical parameters that are presented. (more…)

By Charlie Cates, ago