Many of the serious health conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity to name a few are related to poor diet choices and lack of exercise or activity. However to be able to keep doing the activities we enjoy or even just to keep doing everyday things, the ablility to move properly and without injury is essential.

For many of the patients I see exercise alone will not improve the weakness or imbalance they have because their muscles are fundamentally inhibited and unable to work properly.

In fact without correcting the root cause of the inhibition, exercise is often an additional stress on the body.

The root cause of the majority of inhibitions I find in my clinic are, local injury or misalignment particularly of the spine, nutritional deficiency and metal either on or in the body affecting the nervous system.

Most of our movement is autonomic meaning you don’t have to think about it. The system that controls this is your reflexive nervous system. There are 2 main reflexes involved in movement:

• The Myotactic reflex which has an important role to play in muscle tone.

It is often called the knee jerk reflex and will be familiar to anyone who has sat in a doctor’s office and had their knee tapped with a hammer and noticed how their foot involuntarily flies forward.

• The Withdrawal Reflex protects us from standing on sharp objects or touching something hot by causing us to pull away from the damaging sensory input. It is also the reflex that is in action when we are being tickled.

The other autonomic response is called “The Law of Reciprocal Inhibition” discovered by Sir Charles Sherrington over 100 years ago. It recognises the bodies’ innate ability to contract one muscle group whilst extending the opposing muscle. The easiest muscles to use as an example are the biceps and triceps, the muscles that move the elbow. Whenever we bend our elbow, the bicep contracts. As the bicep is contracting, messages are sent to the opposing tricep muscle to temporarily reduce its tone. The bicep is said to be facilitated, the tricep inhibited.

At my clinic I assess a patient's reflexive nervous system by individually testing your muscles ability to resist gentle pressure. 

When a reflex is working properly the patients muscles will engage if they are not then the muscle will fail. This is often described and felt by the patient as a weakness. Once I have located all the weakness's it is then possible to identify the root cause of the problem they are experiencing.