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length-associated

How to identify the most common cause of Movement Dysfunction

The most common and major cause of movement dysfunction The most common and major cause of movement dysfunction is joint immobilisation accompanied by length-associated changes in tissues (Grossman et al., 1982; Janda, 1993).  When a joint becomes immobilized, initially there are two categories of muscle state; hypertonia: an excited, overactive and dominant muscle; and hypotonia: weak, inhibited, under-active with reduced feed-forwards capacity. Note the ‘initial’ emphasis in the previous sentence – the ‘effect’ of an injury commonly has phases i.e. phase 1, acute, generally days 1 to 3, phase 2, acute, days 4 through to 3 weeks and so on. Over the past four decades length-associated change observed in muscle tissue, seen when a joint is immobilised, has been categorized in to two symptomatic states; ‘stretch-weakened’ and ‘adaptive shortened’ (Kendall, McCreary, Provance, Rodgers & Romani, 2005). These two conditions of length-associated change, have an immediate negative influence on the physiological, …

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Is MSK Rehab and Research Missing the Point?

Musculoskeletal properties related to movement effectiveness Movement effectiveness can be any task i.e. stand-to-sit, lunge, walk etc.  For this blog we shall be looking at ‘vertical jumps’. Jump movements are commonly used as part of the sports-biomechanical research to measure overall power of the lower extremities (Bosco and Komi, 1979; Hunter and Marshall, 2002; Marques and Gonzalez-Badillo, 2011) and as a training task for improving performance and power (Bobbert, 1990; Krol andd Mynarski, 2012). During the jump, there is a complex interaction between three joints; hip, knee and ankle. Anatomically the most important factors to achieve maximal jump coordination, ineffective movements are minimised and effective movements maximised, will depend upon the number of joints a muscle spans, physiological cross section of a muscle (van Soest and Bobbert, 1993), muscle tendon length ratio (Voigt, Simonsen, Dyhre-Poulson and Klausen, 1995; Finni, 2000), length and velocity of muscle contraction (Hill, 1938; Voigt et …

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