So today I want to talk to you about an exciting new technique that we have here at LifeMotion called dry needling and it’s a technique where we use a small monofilament needle and we actually insert it into a muscle and create what’s called a twitch response, so it’s an involuntary contraction of the muscle, and we get a great response afterwards. This works really, really well in situations where you may have tight or tender muscles. A really common spot we see that is up around the shoulder blade. We have several muscles that are here, that make up your rotator cuff. So if you have chronic neck pain, maybe you’ve had a shoulder surgery, or your shoulders been bothering you a lot, I want to show you a technique today that can help give you very quick relief.
Right now we’re at his left shoulder blade and right here, we’ve got a ridge and then this is either side of his shoulder blade and there’s a series of muscles that sit right through here that are often very tender and I’m going to show you how we needle these.
What we’re going to do is take a small dry needle here. Again, we’re going to find the edges of the shoulder blade. We’re going to look for trigger points he may have and then from here, we’re going to push directly down and we’re actually going to insert that needle into the muscle and piston up and down, until we get a twitch response. Very good. We’ll do one more here for the lower muscle in his shoulder blade. Again, looking for trigger points. Good and we get a twitch response there and then we’ll release that.
In addition to the dry needling, we can actually apply electrical stim, through the needle itself, and we use a low amplitude, or low power output, through the needle and we can change the frequency. So how fast the muscle fires and I’m going to show you how that works now.
So, we’re going to apply leads here through the needle and what you’re going to see is, when I turn this on, Garrett’s going to let me know when he feels it and you’re going to start seeing those muscles contract and what we’ll do is we’ll leave this on here for up to several minutes. This does a couple of things. First of all, it helps reduce the soreness after the dry needling for him. And then in addition to that, the electrical input that goes through the muscle helps get a lot of that mind-body connection back again, figuring out how that muscle is supposed to fire properly.
This is a great technique. It’s very fast and it’s very effective to clean up a lot of those muscular type pains that you may have. A great spot is up around the shoulder blade, if you have some chronic neck or mid-back pain.
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