Sometimes the muscle you want to contract isn’t the one that contracts when you try to perform a movement. This goes for both orthopedic stuff and neurologic stuff. Way the hell more with neurologic stuff though.
I’m working with someone right now and one of my goals is to get her quadriceps muscle stronger. The thigh muscle. An exercise that I ask this person to do, I kind of made it up so it doesn’t really have a name, is to – seated – start with the leg bent and try to straighten it as much as possible. She is only able to straighten her leg about 15-20 degrees forward. So the leg is kicked forward from about 100 degrees of flexion to like 80 degrees of flexion. It’s this exercise but the leg is not fully straightened.
Anyway, when she attempts this movement, she recruits her hip flexor muscle and her knee raises up slightly. In order to work the quadriceps muscle, sometimes I have to hold down her knee down and block it from raising up so that the quad is working more, not the hip flexor.
I allow the incorrect movement some though. In a few weeks of performing this movement, the incorrect movement has significantly decreased, a sign that the correct muscle, the quad, is gaining strength and control. I wonder how NDT therapists would deal with an issue like this. In NDT therapy, the goal is to inhibit all the bad, incorrect movements. That is so very strange to me.
Categories: Brain stuff, Health, Rehab, Stroke stuff
Would lying on your stomach and using your good leg to raise the bad leg to perpendicular and then extending the bad leg to the floor recruit the correct muscles? Gravity would be an ally. Maybe just as a start until the muscles are strong enough to do it sitting?
Yes it would!! That would use the quadriceps eccentrically.
No it wouldn’t. OMG sorry I’m wrong, oops. What you’re describing would use the hamstrings eccentrically, not the quads.
See, I’m no narcissist. I’m fully capable of apologizing and admitting when I make a mistake.
There is no way you could ever be considered a narcissist. An acquaintence once asked if I was a narcissist because of my divorce. I ran thru the tests, nope not even close. I may be arrogant as all getout but I don’t think I meet any sociopathic qualities.