“Do you have any ways to make sure the right muscles are working when i do this exercise?”
Surface EMG biofeedback can be a helpful tool in both re-teaching and also confirming that the muscles that should be working during an exercise are firing well. We use a simple little sticky electrode attached by a wire to a hand-held unit that uses an audible sound and a blinking red light to help you know when that muscle is firing. For plenty of people in pain or after a surgery the muscles sort of “forget” how to fire…well, better stated – the nervous system isn’t sending signals to the muscle properly.
Our biofeedback unit picks up on the electrical activity from the nerves to provide a “connecting the dots” between your intentions, thoughts, and efforts at getting muscles to turn on and whether they actually are.
This can be used to retrain inhibited muscles or to confirm good contraction during exercises. It can also be used to ensure the wrong muscles aren’t compensating excessively. Our preference for the body, because we’re always desiring authentic function, is that muscle activity be subconscious/unconscious – meaning that you’re not having to actively think about and try to “squeeze” a muscle for it to work. But for some injuries and surgeries getting a muscle to “react” into firing is either unsafe, difficult to control, or not working.
That’s when we can resort to supplementing with the biofeedback unit to help regain muscle control.
