Muscle Balance Assessment
What is muscle balance assessment ?
Whenever you visit a physio, aside from asking lots of questions, they will generally make an assessment of movements and conduct specific tests to determine the area of injury as well as understand your muscle strength and length.
A muscle balance assessment is a more comprehensive look at how the whole body moves and its relationship to a specific sport or activity. It looks at movement patterns, alignment of the body, joint stiffness and mobility, muscle length, strength and flexibility and the impact this has on the movement of the body.
A full muscle balance assessment covers:
- Postural alignment
- Basic movement testing
- Functional movement tests
- Strength and flexibility tests
- Balance assessment
- Joint mobility and range of movement of specific joints
All this information is collected and analysed and helps to identify areas that may need focused rehabilitation or treatment.
The benefits of muscle balance assessment
It can be helpful for people who are participating in a lot of sport or have had a number of injuries in a short space of time and want to work on injury prevention, or simply wish to improve their overall performance.
Improvement areas are usually identified and then specific exercises, functional movements and stretches are developed for each individual.
It can be useful to have a muscle balance assessment in the pre or off-season of a particular sport. Identifying possible problem areas prior to a season or event gives people time to work on these areas and approach their sport with confidence, potentially reducing the occurrence of injuries as well as helping to improve performance.