Muscle Memory, neuromuscular facilitation and reciprocal patterning
Repetitive exercises that stimulate muscle memory lead to Spinal Cord Injury Recovery and Stroke recovery
Muscle memory is a layman’s term for neuromuscular facilitation or reciprocal patterning which is the process of the neuromuscular system exhibiting a motor skill. Without sounding scientific, there are two types of motor skills, fine and gross. Fine motor skills are very minute and small skills we perform with our hands such as brushing our teeth, combing our hair, or using a pencil or pen to write. Gross motor skills are those actions that require large body parts and large body movements like running, jumping, throwing, bowling, golfing, swimming, or lifting weights.
For clients with a spinal cord injury or stroke, the key to maximizing their success is to use a Comprehensive Activity-based Strength Training approach, such as Neuroxcel's® C.A.S.T.® program to stimulate muscle memory. Exercise training rely's upon the body’s ability to assimilate a given activity and adapt to the training. The body’s ability to remember a given exercise(s), repetition after repetition, induces its own form of muscle memory and adapts to the training by increasing its physical fitness in preparation for the next training session. As a body adapts to training, the subsequent changes are a form or representation of its “muscle memory”.
Source: University Of Michigan Posted: January 28, 2004
The research was partially supported by five grants from the National Institutes of Health. The team worked with four patients with clinically complete spinal cord injury, doing about 30 sessions with each over about 1.5 years. They hooked each subject into a harness suspended over a treadmill. Trainers helped move the subjects' legs as they stepped on the treadmill.
Study: Muscles Respond To Getting On Your Feet After Spinal Cord Injury
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- When someone's spinal cord is completely severed, brain signals can no longer reach the legs to tell the legs to walk.
A study in this month's journal Spinal Cord shows that those who have suffered a spinal cord injury can generate muscle activity independent of brain signals. Dan Ferris, now an assistant professor of kinesiology at U-M, led the research as part of his post-doctorate work with Susan Harkema at University of California Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine.
While many studies have shown that locomotor training, such as working with patients on treadmills, is a viable therapy for helping those who have suffered a spinal cord injury learn to walk again, Ferris and his UCLA colleagues added further evidence that adding weight to the limbs during therapy can provide an important sensory cue to help regain walking.
They also found that moving one leg in therapy can help activate muscles in the opposite leg.
"Nobody has been able to show that in humans before," said Ferris, also an assistant professor of biomedical engineering. "It appears there are left-to-right connections in the signal in the spinal cord, not just connections from the brain to the legs."
When the subjects were positioned so that just one leg was on the moving treadmill belt and the other was off the side, not touching the treadmill surface, the team was able to get muscle response in one leg by simulating walking with the other.
"If you step one leg, you can get muscle activation in the other, even when it isn't moving," Ferris said. "This shows that it isn't just muscle stretch that causes activitation."
Ferris and the team---Harkema, Keith Gordan and Janell Beres-Jones---see great potential in this information for developing rehabilitation strategies.
Therapists helping patients recover from spinal cord injury should provide sensory information that simulates walking as closely as possible. Weight loading and movement in one leg can influence what happens in the other leg.
The Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation is funding another project, led by Ferris, to build powered braces to help those with spinal cord injury regain the ability to walk. Ferris speculates that perhaps such braces could help move the legs to recreate a more normal stepping pattern during rehabilitation. Ferris is testing a working model of the braces to assist patients in walking.
Harkema is heading up a second project funded by the foundation to study the therapeutic effects of stand training after spinal cord injury. Neuroxcel® is participating in this research through success examples from its clients in the C.A.S.T.® program.