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| Peter G. Levine Stronger After Stroke |
Do you have muscles tightened by spasticity?
Sarcomeres are the small units in muscle that contract when your muscles contract. (Great image here. Look at the bottom right corner.) Sarcomeres will increase in numbers when muscle is put through a prolonged stretch. Increasing sarcomeres is how muscles are lengthened. Lengthening of muscle and increasing sarcomeres increases flexibility. Which is a good thing because we can talk about neuroplasticity until the cows come home but if your arm (or whatever) "won't go that way," all bets are off.
OK. So how might you increase the number of sarcomeres? One way that many clinicians think works is called "dynamic splinting." The idea is that you'd wear something that would hold you in a position that would stretch you. If you could wear it at that posture for 2-3 hours, the clinician would "dial in" a more "aggressive" range of motion. Over time you'd gain sarcomeres which would allow you to have more range of motion.Sounds groovy, right?
It works for, say, marital artists who want flexibility so they can KICK ASS.
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Dynamic stretching ROCKS! Sometimes!
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But yeah. That whole science thing gets in the way. Don't you just hate science?
It turns out that the way to elongate (add sarcomeres) "normal" muscle is nothing like the way you'd do it in spastic muscle. To stretch spastic muscles so they gain length, the stretch must be held at least 48 hours. And dynamic splints are not kept on for anywhere near that long; a few hours, max.
And here's another little interesting tidbit. The 600 pound gorilla of dynamic splints is a company call DynaSplint (get it?) and they've had a little bit of trouble lately. The kind of trouble where they may have defrauded the Federal Govmint. And they laid off 500 workers in one day. Which makes sense since it was a DynaSplint salesperson that was the whistle-blower that brought the whole company down. Which then triggered their bank to stop their operating budget.
And while I have no idea of any of those problems are warranted, one thing I do know is that they are fraudulent in another way. Again and again they claim that their splinting systems help folks with spasticity. They also claim they increase muscle length. Don't buy it!
See the original article:
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