The Power of NeuroKinetic Therapy®

NeuroKinetic Therapy (NKT) is the process of finding the root cause of muscle dysfunction or pain, and retraining the brain to recruit the muscles in the correct pattern.  We develop dysfunctional movement patterns for various reasons: repetitive stress, an acute injury, poor posture, lifestyle choices, and a host of other reasons.  NKT allows us to pinpoint the exact muscles that are not being recruited by the brain and through self-muscle release techniques and gentle strengthening exercises, gets the muscles to be recruited properly again.  

We started working with a 21 year old college football player who had been dealing with years of chronic low back pain, several hamstring tears, and has had to sit out last season because of a severe grade 2 hamstring tear that was diagnosed through an MRI.  The client also complained about his calves burning intensely during church when he had to stand still.  After working with him for over a month, we were able to make his back pain go away, take the strain off his hamstrings and calves, and help get him back to school to play football.  

We noticed during the first meeting that he had an excessive forward lean which was putting a lot of stress on his calves and hamstrings.   While doing the NKT Assessment, we found that his jaw was compensating for his right glute and his neck extensors were compensating for his lumbar erectors.  This caused his lumbar spine to become compressed and painful.   Once we were able to get his glute and lumbar erectors functioning properly, his back pain reduced to almost zero and the stress on his calves was relieved.  

Shown below are the before and after pictures showing the excessive forward lean on the left and on the right the forward lean is almost gone.  We also had him work on flexibility as his calves, quads, and thoracic spine was very tight.  Another thing that complimented his healing was changing from flat bench press to dumbbell bench press on a stability ball.  This change eliminated the severe force being placed on the lumbar spine during heavy bench pressing on a flat bench and replaced it with core stabilization by doing the dumbbell bench presses on the stability ball.

If you are interested in seeing what NKT can do for your chronic pain, contact one of our NKT practitioners: John Grainger, KatherineMacPherson, or Garret Wilson.  We will also be holding a lecture on NKT on March 8 at 6:30 PM at UVAC. Find out more.

The vertical center line in the pictures should be going right through his ear.  As you can see in the left (before) picture, he is leaning 4 inches forward, and in the right (after) picture he is leaning less than an inch forward.  In each picture he felt like he was standing up straight.  I would expect him to continue to improve his posture through his dedicated work on his NKT homework.

By John Grainger MS, CSCS, NKT-Level 1
Upper Valley Aquatic Center
Fitness and Personal Training Director