muscles

3 Ways MAT® Helps to Boost Your Performance

Oftentimes, when we think of performance we think of athletes, musicians, actors and actresses, or anybody else that we may see on stage or on screen.  But, the truth of the matter is that each of us has to perform every single day.  We have to wake up and perform the various roles and responsibilities of our daily life.  We need to exercise, take care of our family, attend to our tasks at work, and fulfill social obligations.  From the boardroom to the ballfield, we all need to be able to perform, but we may often feel as if we are only surviving instead of thriving.  Fortunately, Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®) can help us boost our physical performance so we can do the things we love to do as well as we would like to do them for the foreseeable future.  Here’s how.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

How muscles saved me from blowing out my knee

When I was 24 years old, I thought I had blown out my knee.  I was playing in a basketball game in a rec league at DePaul University.  During one play, I went up to dunk the ball and got hit in the chest by a defender.  I reached to grab the rib to regain my balance, but the hit knocked me hard enough that I couldn’t hang on.  I slipped, fell backwards, and stuck my leg out to land.  The problem was that I stuck my leg out completely straight and my body was falling overtop of it at a weird angle.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Joint Injuries and Your Internal Suspension System

Joint injuries and injuries to passive tissues such as ligaments and discs are ever-present in our society today.  Whether it is rupturing a meniscus or an ACL or herniating a disc, it seems as if both competitive athletes and weekend warriors alike are commonly plagued by injuries to the passive tissues of their body.  With these types of injuries only becoming more commonplace from high school athletes to middle-aged rec-leaguers, the question of, “What can be done to help prevent these types of injuries?” naturally comes up.  Fortunately, there is something that can be done, and the answer lies in the active tissues of the body – the skeletal muscles.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Shoveling snow? Make sure to stay safe with these exercise tips!

Welcome back to this week’s edition of 2-Minute Tuesdays where we are talking about one exercise topic for two minutes and giving you three reasons why you should follow our advice.  Now this week, we are putting out some content for those of you who have been assigned the chore of shoveling snow.  Winter is on its way.  You may have already had a blizzard or two.  But, if not, we have got to get you ready so you can shovel the snow with zero injury and maximum efficiency.

 

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By Team MAS, ago

Compensation – How Your Feet Can Be Creating Back Issues

Compensation often gets a bad rap.  It is portrayed in a negative light as the demise of your orthopedic health and something that needs to be eviscerated by any means necessary.  However, compensation is actually a brilliant way for your body to remain highly functioning from one moment to the next.  Without compensation, we would likely have far more physical issues throughout our entire body.  The caveat, though, is that we may not want to compensate in the same manner for an extended period of time.  Not only can this put excess stress on certain muscles, it can also stress your joints.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Getting Your Muscles Back To Par

When I was first introduced to Muscle Activation Techniques® in 2010, I had never seen it before or heard of it before.  But, the goal of MAT® fit perfectly with an idea I had developed about 18 months earlier.  See, throughout high school and college, I was really big into sports performance.  Initially, my interest stemmed from wanting to improve my own performance, but it soon grew into wanting to help others improve their performance, as well.

By my senior year of college, I was working with a number of sports teams and individual athletes on campus.  I was also constantly running experiments on myself, the most notable of which was testing the hypothesis that if I could just get my body working the way it was designed to work, then I would be able to perform at a much higher level than I ever was before.

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By Charlie Cates, ago

Are you a candidate for MAT®? Answer these three questions to find out!

At Muscle Activation Schaumburg, we often receive the question of, “How do I know if Muscle Activation Techniques® is something I should be doing?”.  This is a very valid question because MAT® is something that helps a wide variety of people, from professional athletes to professional parents, from elementary school kids to executives, and from the most active among us to those who are far more sedentary.  All of these populations seem to benefit from MAT®, so how can you know if MAT® is something that you are a candidate for?

When it comes to the “who” of MAT®, we generally see that our clients fall into one of three categories here at Muscle Activation Schaumburg.  But, the category that you fall into depends on how you answer the following three questions.  If you want to know if you are a candidate for MAT®, ask yourself these three questions: (more…)

By Charlie Cates, ago

What is MAT®? A brief history and overview.

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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By Charlie Cates, ago