| Description |
When a skeletal muscle is inhibited from operating at its full function it is called an aberrant muscle. Such inhibition tends to occur after joint trauma in order to protect the injured area from further aggravation. However, inhibition can linger after the injury is healed, which negatively impacts performance and predisposes an individual to further injury. It is in response to the permanent nature of aberrant muscles, that an alternative muscle therapy called Advanced Muscle Integration Technique (AMIT) was developed. The purpose of AMIT is to identify aberrant muscles and then reactivate these inhibited muscles. This study addresses both the occurrence of aberrant muscles and how their function is impacted by AMIT treatment. To explore the frequency of aberrant muscle formation, a healthy population of 18-35-year-old adults were tested for aberrancy in their gluteus maximus muscle. The functional integrity of this muscle was tested by measuring the range of hip extension, force production, and electrical activity through EMG surface electrodes during maximum voluntary contractions. The gluteus maximus muscle was bilaterally aberrant in 46.6% of the subjects. AMIT treatment was then applied to both normal and aberrant muscles through a single blind experimental design. Following treatment, the functional integrity of the muscles was once again tested, which showed that there was a significant increase in hip extension (p-value: 0.003906) and force production (p-value: 0.03711) for aberrant muscles, without similar results in normal muscles. While further experiments are needed to understand the physiological mechanisms of these profound changes, these findings demonstrate that muscle inhibition does occur and can be tested, and AMIT is an alternative treatment method to rehabilitate aberrant muscles. |
