How to Identify your Target Muscle for mTrigger Biofeedback

One of the most important aspects of setting up your mTrigger biofeedback device, is knowing your target muscle. The target muscle can be defined as ‘the muscle in which you are trying to increase or decrease muscle activation of during a given exercise.’ Now, where this gets tricky, is each exercise can have multiple target muscles, it just depends on your goal.

To break this down further, we’ll look at a few different clinical examples. Let’s start with the step-up exercise. This exercise can have several different correct target muscles, say glutes or quads, depending on your goal for the exercise. For example, if you select a step-up exercise for your patient to help improve their knee control and quad activation after knee surgery, then the quads would be your target muscle! Just like we see with this patient below.

Now say several weeks later with the same patient, you want to work on improving knee alignment and dynamic valgus. During the same step-up exercise, your focus is now on glute med activation to improve lower extremity alignment. Now your target muscle becomes the gluteus medius! In this video example, we can see the patient working on increasing glute med activation to help improve their movement pattern during the step-up exercise.

There are a couple ways to go about selecting the correct target muscle.

The first way to go about this, is when selecting your patients exercise, ask yourself what is my goal for this exercise? Is it to increase quad strength – then the quad would be your target muscle. Is it to improve lower trap activation with lifting – then the lower trap would be your target muscle. Is it to decrease hamstring activation and muscle guarding – then the hamstring would be your target muscle.

Here is how this all plays out. With the goal of increasing quad activation during a straight leg raise, the target muscle is the quads.

With the goal of increasing lower trap activation during a lifting exercise, the target muscle becomes the lower traps, just like we see here during this arm raise exercise.

Finally, when performing a prone hang and trying to diminish hamstring muscle guarding the target muscle becomes the hamstrings and the exercise is performed just like this.

The second way to go about selecting the best target muscle is to use your expertese in movement analysis. As you watch your patients’ perform their exercises, what is wrong? How can their movement pattern be improved? What muscle group needs to become the focus so their movement becomes more desirable?

For example, during a side-lying external rotation exercise you notice your patient is using their deltoid and momentum to rotate the arm instead of their posterior rotator cuff. You need the patient to understand what activating the infraspinatus feels like and for this use real time biofeedback. In this example, your movement analysis has led to the selection of the infraspinatus as your target muscle. The exercise would look something like this!

How about during a bird dog exercise you notice your patient is overextending their low back and not engaging their lower abs or lumbar paraspinals as desired. This is the perfect situation for a dual channel set up with two target muscles. Movement analysis has demonstrated the need for patient feedback in the lumbar paraspinals and abdominals. These two groups become your target muscles. Take a look.

Another example of using a dual channel set up for your target muscle is when performing bilateral movements such as a squat. If during your patients for set of squats you notice they continually shift their weight to the right off the surgical side, you have identified the need for biofeedback to help improve their understanding of weight distribution. The quads become the target muscle bilaterally as the patient uses mTrigger biofeedback to train a better movement pattern. Just like this.

Summary
Using biofeedback to help improve your patients muscle activation, effort level, and movement patterns can prove to be extremely helpful, however, you first have to know how to select the appropriate target muscle. By following the suggestions in this blog and using your skills in movement analysis, identifying the target muscle can be easy.

How the Experts are using mTrigger Biofeedback