This week, I want to dive headfirst into this discussion of, “What is Muscle Activation Techniques®?”. Specifically, I want to discuss what the number one goal of MAT® is and why achieving that goal is important.
But, in order to understand what MAT® is, we need to first understand how it began. MAT® was developed by Greg Roskopf and has been taught since the early 2000’s. Greg has his world corporate headquarters south of Denver where he is a consultant to many of professional sports teams in the area as well as many high-level individual athletes.
Early on in Greg’s career, he recognized that many people have asymmetrical motion between the right and left sides of their body. For example, somebody may be able to lift their left arm all the way up but only lift their right arm part of the way. Now, his original training had him focusing on stretching the side that didn’t move as well. This is a concept that I am sure many people are familiar with, where if your muscles feel really tight you try to stretch them to help get your joints moving better and loosen the muscles up.
However, Greg soon became introduced to this idea of muscle testing where a practitioner pushes on a client’s limb to see how much force they can generate. And it was from there that he started to correlate that if somebody’s shoulder or hip couldn’t move as well on one side as it could on the other, there were often muscle weaknesses that were associated with the limited side, too. Furthermore, when those weak muscles were addressed and their output improved, joint motion would improve as well.
This correlation became the basis for what is now known as the Roskopf Principle, which states that muscle tightness is secondary to muscle weakness.
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