Customer Reviews

Applied Kinesiology: Muscle Response in Diagnosis, Therapy, and Preventive Medicine (Thorson's Inside Health Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is designed to give readers an introduction to muscle testing used in health assessment and treatment. It is written for the patient rather than as a guide for practitioners, and thus focuses mainly on what treatments are like, what they can accomplish, and what can be expected from these approaches. This book is useful for its intended purpose, but doesn't provide a clear understanding of the science behind kinesiology or ways of developing skills as a practitioner to make therapeutic use of this.

I found yhis book very informative, it gives interesting accounts on every part of the body by recognising responses in the muscles. It gives plain explanations and easy guidedlines to follow, this would assist a student to be able to recognise step by step and help them to recieve messages about healthy or unhealthy parts of the body.' It would also help them to form an opinion as how to help the patient and follow thru with medication in erbel therepies and also make the patient aware of the bodies functions. This book has been thouroughly written with thought, and easy to read and understand without getting very technical.

This is a fascinating & highly educational book. It is not too complicated though very detailed; a novice can understand. The book is "too cool".

The previous review said more than I can rightfully
say here but I will ad that Tom's show, Midas Report-
True Health is very good as well. Check it out at:
9.985 mhz or 9.970 mhz shortwave one, Mondays and
Wednesdays, 3-4 p.m., WWCR, Nashvegas, TN.

I used this book to get a better background in applied kinesiology principles to help me with my research into the body mechanics and kinesiology of the martial arts. I am a karate, kung fu, and kali/escrima teacher who has developed some ideas especially about punching and kicking techniques, so I thought I'd make a few comments on that, as this book was very helpful in discussing current theory and practice and helping me to sharpen my own ideas on the subject, especially in regard to the analysis of rapid-fire punching techniques.

There are several mechanisms that need to be discussed. The first thing is that rapid-fire punching requires instantaneously unloading the intrafusal muscle spindles by the use of contralateral inhibition of flexor-extensor pairs. This is a well-understood spinal cord reflex, and just means that muscle viscosity and normal muscle-tension dynamics are inhibited and optimized. In terms of the neural pathways, this is mediated by two nerve tracts, the neospinalthalamic and the paleospinalthalamic tracts, or the alpha and gamma motor efferent systems, respectively. But basically, in muscle kinesiology circles, this is known as a "plyometric jerk," and is one way that basketball players use to jump higher.

The second thing is that after the first punch, there are released massive shaking forces which propagate through the various musculo-skeletal systems in a quasi-resonant fashion which can be used to facilitate the acceleration and launch of the next punch in the sequence. These, as you might expect, are very difficult dynamics to control, being nonlinear in their behavior, but it is possible to re-sequence the muscles involved in such a punching series to take advantage of them. I have had some success in setting up "standing waves" to take advantage of this phenomenon. Standing wave may not be quite right, from a neuromuscular control standpoint, as it is perhaps more like stochastic resonance, since it can be shown that the muscle fibers use a process known as recruitment which is quite statistical mechanical in nature.

Third, the overall muscle mechanics of such a sequence must use a massive, avalanche-like, pulse-oriented "starting focus" to launch the technique, after which it essentially goes "ballistic" for most of the trajectory of the punch, until final termination when normal "ending focus" is applied. From a practical standpoint, this means the punches are bouncing off the endpoints of the punch, which are strongly focused, but with nothing much in the way of tension in-between. This method also eliminates the wasteful, continuous power-utilization curve that most even very experienced black belts use when they punch. This is okay for a one or two punch combo, but not for much beyond that, because this method of coordinating the muscles will impede the necessary fast switching constants that the nervous pathways require to make this work. The neural pathways involved in this are known as the alpha and gamma-motor efferent systems, and their workings are well understood by neurobiologists.