Here is a great little thing that I came up with, at least I think it's great.
I'm going to ask Michelle here, we're going to test her amount of hip extension by asking her
to keep her knee straight and raise this thing as high as you can. Wow, you don't have much hip
extension. Make sure they keep their ASIS against the table. Come on, raise that higher - is that
all the height you can go? That's not very good. Sorry. So, we're going to try to do
something to wake those glutes up. Glute Max up into hip extension. So I'm putting her in
a figure four because for this to be effective we have to have the muscles on the stretch. So,
we're going to put glute max on the stretch. We're going to kick in a mild stretch reflex through the
dynamic gamma motor neuron system. The muscle spindle. We're going to try to create confusion
in those intrafusal and extrafusal fibers so that it creates tone and starts to activate this weak
glute. So here I go. I've got soft fists, you can use whatever tool you want. I'm dropping my
body weight and I'm going to start with a fast paced, almost irritating, slightly irritating,
spindle stem maneuver. Going all over and in all different directions
on glute max, to wake that up. You're not doing tapotement. I don't want you doing this. I'm
dropping my body weight. Coming in and dropping my body weight and doing fast paced spindle maneuvers
with my fists. Two minutes per side. I'm really waking this thing up. Come down low.
Okay. Now let's stop and pull her out of here. Ok, raise that leg.
A little better. Quite a bit better, really. Make sure when you do this test they keep the
ASIS pinned to the table or else they'll cheat on you. You know, if they can lift the whole
hip then you won't get a true test. Do this every session, wake up those weak gluteals.
First of all I'm going to test Michelle to see how activated her lower shoulder stabilizers really
are. How activated they are. So, I'm going to ask her just to raise that arm as high as she can,
while I kinda hold this down. And that's about as much
retraction as she has there. Scapular retraction she have. One more time, come on, lift back up
with it again. That's not too bad. She's pretty good. Let's see if we can create a little bit
more tone in there. So what we do, we put them in a hand cuffed position, right here. She grabs like
that so we can put the muscles on the stretch. You can see now that the rhomboids and the
lower traps are on the stretch. Posterior rotator cuff, gotta work on it too. Typically weak. That's
why we're getting a lot of rotator cuff injuries from this internal rotation and allowing the
supraspinatus muscles to get trapped under in that glenoid fossa and all those problems that
we're familiar with. Ok, so we can use fingers, fists, elbows, whatever we want to use. But I'm
going to start out with fingers on Michelle here. And I'm just going to create some tone in here by
going in all different directions using my body weight. Be sure to drop your body weight in here.
And stimulating tone in first the lower shoulder stabilizers all the way down to
lower traps where the lower trapezius insert, around T-12.
Creating some tone. And moving the erectors back toward the midline. And creating some tone.
All different directions, the fibers are running in all different directions.
You can do this with fists,
dropping your body weight. You gotta really put some force through there to make it work.
The dynamic gamma motor neurons system or the muscle spindle is what's causing this
activation. Now come on to the posterior rotator cuff. So I'm going to create a little tone in the
posterior rotator cuff muscles.
Ok, so we're just on this one side. So we'll test and see if this has helped Michelle. So,
now, let's raise it as high as you can. Wow, pretty good. Quite a bit more activation in
there. Try this one. And first time, when they come into your session for the next session
immediately test the before and after to see how long it's staying. That's what we're working on
right now. How long can we make this stay and how many sessions does it take to keep this activated?