Experiments in Muscle Testing – Episode 1: The Pilot Episode

I’ve always felt that the best way to let creativity flow is with good friends, good food and a 10 course meal from ancient Rome.

This night was no exception. The girls approved a “boy’s night out”, the boys came over to my place and I did up one of my famous roman feasts. I very rudely wrote the menu in classical Latin and then forgot to translate it into English, so I spent half the night explaining what everything was. Lesson learned…

Here’s the menu, with translation below:

Too bad I didn’t spell ”Worcestershire Sauce” phonetically. Steve was under some confusion as to how to pronounce it and now I am too…

MUSCLE TESTING

The topic of conversation came around to muscle testing, as it always seems to when I’m around. John brought up the point that he was having trouble distinguishing a strong muscle testing response from a weak one, and didn’t feel confident interpreting his test results.

It’s a valid concern, and probably the main sticking point for 99% of beginners learning how to perform a muscle test properly: how to know whether they’re forcing the test-person’s arm down, so that every test comes up “weak”, or pressing so lightly that every test is “strong”. It deserves a thorough explanation, so I’ll deal with it in more detail in a future post.

But the real inspiration came when the boys suggested doing a set of videos about muscle testing. I reason that if some of my closest friends see the need for a videos series about muscle testing, people who know almost nothing about it would definitely benefit.

After all, what is muscle testing?

HISTORY

Muscle testing was developed in its modern form by George Goodheart. Originally a Chiropractor, he went on to found the International College of Applied Kinesiologists (ICAK – the organization that uses muscle testing professionally in medical diagnosis).

Muscle Testing in a rudimentary form already existed in Goodheart’s day. One of his academic resources was Kendall and Kendall’s 1930’s textbook Muscles: Testing and Function With Posture and Pain, which is still in use today.

So, to clarify, it wasn’t simply pushing on muscles that Goodheart “invented”, but rather, the realization that strong or weak responses meant something. In his case, he became aware that there was a correlation between the functioning of a muscle group and a corresponding organ. A weakness in the pectoralis major muscle, for example, could sometimes be traced to a stomach problem, where addressing the stomach problem sometimes re-innervated the pectoralis major. In short: really cool stuff.

Goodheart recruited a group of like-minded practitioners, which later became known as “the dirty dozen”, named after a popular 1967 movie by that title and together, they went on to create greater levels of distinction within the field by exploring other biomechanical relationships, such as those of using muscle testing to explore vitamin and mineral deficiency, the organ meridians, the lymphatic system, the fascial system, hormonal relationships and even the influence of neurochemistry on the nervous system through emotional output via the brain.

These explorations have culminated in the realization that it is possible to engage in a sort of non-verbal biomechanical dialogue with the nervous system, through the use of an indicator muscle, where primitive strong and weak responses to stimuli enable the muscle tester to arrive at conclusions about which stimuli are in the test subject’s best interests.

TOPICS

I get a lot of requests to post videos on various aspects of muscle testing, so I’ve made a short list of which ones I’m planning to shoot in upcoming episodes of the Experiments in Muscle Testing Show:

Episode 2: Muscle Testing Bicep Curls
Episode 3: Muscle Testing Cologne
Episode 4:Muscle Testing Computer Monitors
Episode 5: Muscle Testing Book Reviews
Episode 6: Muscle Testing Magnetic Fields
Episode 7: Muscle Testing KettleBell
Episode 8: Muscle Testing Alcohol
Episode 9: Muscle Testing iPod earphones
Episode 10: The best-selling books of Muscle Testing

CATEGORIES

There are different kinds of muscle testing, or more specifically, only one kind but different things it can be used for. I find it helpful to group these things into categories:

1. Muscle Activation (eg. Rehabilitation through reactivation, which I offer therapy in).

2. Muscle Testing the effects of exercise (using an indicator test as a before & after comparison to determine perfect form on an exercise – this is great for achieving maximum lifts, sports performance, stability or just staying out of pain by avoiding injury, and as far as I know, I am the first one to use muscle testing for this application) .

3. Substance Testing: exposing substances, such as food or cologne, to a test subject’s body and determining whether they have a strengthening or weakening effect on the person’s nervous system. Many naturopaths already use this to identify food allergies.

4. Sensory Testing: evaluating the effects of stimuli on the 5 senses (for example, testing the brightness of a computer monitor on a test subject’s eyes to avoid/eliminate headaches from computer eye strain).

5. Book reviews: the cornerstone of learning is knowing what others have already learned, and there are dozens of amazing authors who have made solid contributions to a growing body of literature about muscle testing. I’ve read a lot of these guys and think it would be cool to share it in video format.

CHECK IT OUT

So that was it, in a nutshell. The boys were stuffed beyond belief. Alex fled after the 7th course, but he insisted it was because he had somewhere to be, and not because he was too full…

And I’m going to be producing the Experiments in Muscle Testing Show.

Just a thought but, why do I always end up doing all the work? I guess if I answered my own question I’d say its because I love what I do: hosting friends, cooking 10 course meals, muscle testing and teaching.

I hope you’ll get the time to watch all the upcoming episodes, they’re going to be cool, fun and free so why not?

I’ll leave you with my recipe for ancient Roman Hydromel (honey-water). It has nothing to do with muscle testing, except that if you drink too much of it you’ll shut off your pancreas (which helps you process sugar) and then you may NEED muscle testing, lol.

It should look something like this, minus the flower vase…

Where to go from here?

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