Do you have tight muscles that cause pain or limit your mobility? Try IMS, or Intramuscular stimulation, to help release them and get you on track with better health, less pain, and better function.
Hi this is Dana Ranahan at Body Works Sports Physiotherapy and we’re here today to talk about IMS or Intra Muscular Stimulation. So I’ve had a lot of questions in the clinic about what is IMS? We’ve had some videos before when we’ve talked about how it’s used but basically a lot of you want to understand well how does this work. How do you acupuncture needles to release tight muscles which is basically what IMS or dry needling is.
So IMS is a model where we look at releasing tight muscles all the way from the spinal signet down to certain muscles to help you move better and effectively what happens in our body is that we get some shortening in muscles so this is a good picture that can help you see it, where it give you the idea of you know, this would be two bones where the muscle is attached between and little tendons on each side where the normal muscle lengthens like this and in a really shortened muscle the muscle almost bunches up like this which creates more pressure or tension on the tendon and can sometimes lead to tendonitis so in this case if we help to release this tight muscle we can help to restore more normal mechanics and take away pain at the attachment where this tendon attaches to the bone or sometimes pain in the tendon or pain at the muscle tendon junction.
So those are all ways that the muscle releasing the muscle helps to take pain away, as well sometimes in the spine if we release the muscles that run along the spine here, if they get super tight they can compress or shorten and jam the spine together and compress the nerve a little bit so if we can release some of the muscles along here as well as muscles that are tight in that segment where the nerve innervates the muscles that can help you to move better all the way through. So with IMS that’s how it works, we use an acupuncture needle into the muscle to help release tension in the muscle and then it helps you to move better and along with that then we give you some exercises to strengthen the muscles you need to get stronger.
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