Joints ACT: muscles REACT

👣 Joints ACT: muscles REACT:

👣 There is a reason I came up with this 2nd big rule of motion up and dedicated a chapter to it in What The Foot? and that is that Muscles do not move the joints in the way we think they do.

👣 Sure, contract some tissue and the connected joints do move… BUT only within the potential of movement available at the joint or structure. 
When you ask someone to extend a knee, for example. They use the quad. And they meet that feeling of ‘terminal’ extension… where they can’t extend it anymore… and yet you can still see the flexed shape in the back of the knee. It’s extendING. But not extendED… you have contracted your quads maximally only to achieve a lesser amount of flexion than you had before, and met your end range of extension. While still being flexed. 👏🏻 You’ll see the same in the foot, the general idea is to shorten the foot by activating the tissues on the plantar (underside) surface of the foot. However, just because the medial arch comes up off the ground, does not necessarily mean that it is supinating. 

👣 A foot supination is a three dimensional experience. A foot inversion though is not a supination. Shortening foot tissues is unlikely to supinate a foot if the structure itself (the bones and joints) cannot move into a supinated shape…… Contracting plantar surface tissue to make a foot short requires each of the 33 joints to be aware of what a supinating foot shape is in order for that tissue to genuinely shorten when you ask it to contract. Creating an environment for the foot bones to supinate naturally creates a shortening of the plantar tissues, but shortening plantar tissues won’t necessarily supinate the foot…. 🤔

👣 This is a clear indicator that joints dominate the muscle. The muscle can only act within the parameters set by or available within a joint’s governance.

👣 The joint governs the potential of the muscle. It’s shape dictates the movement available within the structure and the muscle’s role is to manage the movement of the joint, lengthening eccentrically to allow a joint to move towards its end range, and contracting concentrically to return it back to neutral.

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