How to activate muscles?
Certain muscles are notorious for being quiet. It may sound silly but that is actually one of the biggest challenges in rehab. What happens is that being sedentary, injured, or doing the same thing over and over again changes the activation pattern of your muscles. This can cause pain, bad movement leading to injury, or just not letting you progress forward. So how do we fix that?
Well the first question is: Are we seeing a problem because a muscle is in fact “quiet” or is it because another muscle is being too “loud”? If a muscle is being too loud, that is where hands on techniques such as massage, stretching, deep trigger point pressure and more can quiet it down. I like to utilize this before my own training. If I’m trying to squat but my back muscles are taking over instead of my glutes, I will get on the foam roller and stretch those back muscles out to calm them down. Now I’m ready to fire those glutes up.
If instead the muscle is too quiet this is where activation exercises are great. The best one generally in my opinion are isometrics. That’s a really good place to start but some people respond better to different things which is why having a physical therapist analyze that for you is key. For instance, often times people have this called “glute amnesia” which means forgetting how to use their glutes. It sounds silly but it can lead to so many injuries and dysfunctions that cause pain. Getting people to turn on their glutes take a little bit of finesse because you’re asking someone to change a habit. We know that is not that easy. So I will make sure I position someone where there other muscles are quiet and have them do some basic glute exercises. All the while I’m monitoring that they’re not compensating with their bad habits. Once we dial it down, I want the person to turn on those glutes for so long that it starts to burn. This is so the brain can remember what that feels like. If it’s their first session and they don’t have any competitions coming up, I want those muscles sore so that when they’re walking around, going up stairs, sitting down and standing up, their brain remembers that feeling and they learn how to fire those glutes on command. There are definitely a few more nuances hard to explain on a blog post but if you feel like you need help getting certain muscles fired up so you can train harder or get out of pain, definitely consulting with a physical therapist is a great idea.
