Webinar James Earls MSc: What's the Use of Soft Tissue

What’s the Use of Soft Tissue?

We all learn muscle actions but rarely are we taught how they operate during real-life function. Textbooks are filled with simple exercises and stretches that correspond to the published actions - but is that how all muscles work all the time?

As therapists, I believe, our job is to improve our clients’ performance in the real-world. To achieve that I need to go further than reducing pain and local dysfunction, I need to understand how my client's system works in context of their movement demands. That’s not easy. It requires an understanding of the forces acting on the body, how the tissues can react.

Each type of soft tissue has different characteristics and each muscle has a different architecture. Understanding real-life movement helps explain these variations and opens us to a wider vision of how the body interacts with the world to produce efficient, effective movement or, sadly, falls into poor movement strategies and compensations.

This webinar will briefly explore the causes of soft tissue dysfunction to then look at what research can tell us about how the soft tissues collaborate with momentum, gravity and ground reaction force to unravel the complex picture of normal, real-life movement.

We will explore:

Soft tissue dysfunction

EMG readings during gait

Joint and tissue relationships

Elasticity and stiffness

How movement and soft tissue architecture complement one another

The aim of the webinar is to increase our understanding movement and enhance creativity and accuracy of assessment and treatment plans.