“I have the best job,” says Melissa Moore, a Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) Specialist practicing in Huntingdon, QC. “It’s incredibly rewarding to help people in their daily lives and to see someone regain muscle function when they thought they couldn’t be fixed.”
Melissa is a Huntingdon Academy and CVR graduate who went on to study massage therapy at Kiné-Concept in Montreal. She had worked as a massage therapist since 2004, when she learned about MAT and travelled to Toronto and Denver to receive training and certification in 2013. She now operates her company Corps Optimum (Optimum Body) alongside Amy Forget (also a MAT specialist) on Rue Chateauguay in Huntingdon where business is booming. “It’s almost too much work for the two of us,” she says.
So what is this popular technique? MAT was developed by Greg Roskopf of Denver Colorado in 2000. It is defined as: “A revolutionary approach to the assessment and correction of muscular imbalances, joint instability and limitations in range of motion within the human body.” Roskopf was a former college linebacker who’d suffered a back injury and developed knee and foot problems, leaving him in search of solutions. In his profession as a sports medicine specialist, he studied various schools of thought on musculoskeletal imbalance before combining it all into MAT.
The specialty has developed a cult following in the sports world, with stars like Peyton Manning crediting MAT for his prolonged career. However, equally important results have been reported by people seeking to function better in daily life. Melissa explains that our bodies have a protective mechanism that helps to detect instability. This happens when we walk on ice. We recognize that the ground is unstable so we tighten up—our stride length shortens and we decrease our range of motion. As we age, the same thing happens internally. The only way to change this is to get all our muscles functioning in their full range of motion by activating the weak muscles.
If you went to see her for shoulder pain, for example, she’d ask you to hold your arm out and resist pressure as she tried to move it in various directions. The inability to resist signals a dysfunctional muscle. She would then treat the non-firing muscle by applying pressure. The process isn’t particularly painful, but not exactly a relaxing massage either. Patients can usually expect tangible results in one to six sessions.
What do these results look like? “Seeing someone who has lived with hunched shoulders for years, standing up straight. Or someone who’s suffered chronic curled up toes and bunions, no longer walking in pain,” she says. “That’s why I love my job.”
