Neuromuscular Therapy for Muscle Pain

Your muscles and your nervous system are intricately linked, governing posture, movement and balance. When muscle tension throughout your body is in optimal balance, your body naturally aligns and moves with mechanical efficiency, pain-free.

Wear and tear on your muscles and nerves from repetitive daily activities including work and sports can cause some muscles to become excessively tight from overuse, while others may become lax from underuse. Imbalance in muscle tension can lead to postural problems, poor balance, compressed nerves and muscle pain.

Neuromuscular therapy addresses soft tissues to relieve pain and restore normal function. Treatment is targeted to balancing your nervous, muscular and skeletal systems, to bring your body back into optimal alignment.

Neuromuscular therapy addresses

• postural alignment
• muscle imbalances
• nerve entrapment
• ischemia (restricted blood flow)
• muscular trigger points

In essence, neuromuscular therapy treats your nervous system through your muscular system.

Medical treatment often focuses on treating the area of complaint. For example, you may seek treatment for hip pain from your regular health care provider. They will carefully investigate the region surrounding the painful area, and may in fact find some anomalies in your hip. Treatment may range from pain medication to surgery, depending on the severity of the diagnosis.

However, although your hip is in pain, the cause may be found elsewhere. You may have muscle imbalances in your core, trunk or legs that eventually caused the pain in your hip. If you only treat your hip pain but ignore the underlying cause, the problem will persist, even after invasive surgery.

Pain is often the result of compensation for imbalances in another area of your body. After careful analysis of your posture, gait and range of motion, your neuromuscular therapist may initiate upper body treatment to address lower body pain, or vice versa.

Much of neuromuscular therapy centers on Identifying and treating Trigger Points (TrPs), tiny hyper-sensitive nodules that develop in injured muscle tissue. Trigger points may cause pain at the site of the TrP, or pain may be referred elsewhere in your body. TrPs may also cause numbness, tingling, stiffness and weakness.

Trigger points may result from repetitive motion activities, stress, trauma, or postural imbalances. Poor nutrition may even play a role in developing TrPs. In some cases, TrPs can cause pain that lasts for years if left untreated.

Neuromuscular therapy gets to the source of your muscle pain to:

• balance posture
• increase range of motion
• eliminate pain
• restore optimal health

Conditions successfully treated with neuromuscular therapy include:

• Neck, back or shoulder pain
• General muscle aches and pains
• Arm and hand pain, numbness or tingling
• Leg and foot pain, numbness or tingling
• Tendonitis
• Whiplash
• Muscle strains
• Headaches
• Arthritis
• Circulatory issues
• Poor flexibility
• Sciatic nerve pain
• TMJ syndrome
• Carpal tunnel syndrome