Watch the video now! Hey, Dr. McNamara here over at McLaughlin Care with another Wellness Wednesday for you. And today we're going to talk about Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation, otherwise known as PNF. It allows you to perform this very easy more effective stretching technique. PNF stretching has been shown to increase range of motion and joins as well as improve athletic performance in individuals.
And the way it works is it works on two different mechanisms and I'll show you how so I'm going to start. I'm going to do this on my hamstring. So I'm stretching my knee and hip joint with the hamstring muscle. So I'm reaching over and this is where I feel. Nice pole. So this is a good stretch right here. Now what I'm going to do next,
isn't going to do a contraction. And what this is going to do is it's going to work on inhibition. That means the target muscle I'm using is going to get inhibited, which means it's not going to be contracting when I pushed down into the floor. So I'm actually activating that muscle. And then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to contract my quadricep muscle and that's going to cause reciprocal inhibition because that's the antagonist muscle to our target muscle,the hamstrings.
So I'm pushing down and then I'm going to gain by flexing and going farther into that stretch. Now this reciprocal inhibition me contracting this quad is causing that hamstring to relax. And you can see from that video, I just gain a range of motion. So we do this a lot in the office. I teach a lot of patients how to do this,and I can tell you firsthand the amount of range of motions I, the increases I see in one session is pretty phenomenal. So go ahead, give this a try at home when you're doing the contractions hold for about 10 to 30 seconds. And let's just see if we can get a little bit of range of motion in those joints.
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