01442 800400 Monday - Friday 8:30 - 18:00 Saturday 9:00 - 13:00 42 Lower Kings Road, Berkhamsted Herts HP4 2AA
Over 30 years Simon King has developed a deep and unique understanding of the importance of muscle reflexes and muscle strength in the maintenance of a healthy and pain-free body. He uses innovative treatment strategies to help patients become stronger and healthier so they can exercise and live without fear of illness or injury.
Nerve messages that go TO the brain are called AFFERENT (towards), while those that come FROM the brain are called EFFERENT (away from).
Simon King is an expert in Afferent Input and using Afferent Input to treat and prevent musckuloskeletal injuries.
Over thirty years in practice, Simon has always strived to understand the true origins of disease and ill health. Fascinated by muscle testing and the connections between nerves and muscles, he set about learning all he could about Applied Kinesiology and eventually became a diplomate of the ICAK in 1996. He has gone on to teach hundreds of practitioners the principles of Proprioceptive Medicine and Afferent Input.
With Jane Eastoe, he started the Naturality Wellness Centre in 2005 and has returned to the clinic after 6 years in Australia.
Simon is available Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. His specialties include sports injuries, sports performance enhancement, chronic pain and disability.
Websites:
www.live-without-pain.com
www.proprioception.org.uk
http://afferentinput.org
Afferent Input is the treatment of abnormal muscle tone to improve health.
Muscle tone is what protects our body from injury, increases robustness and controls movement.
Most often, therapists try to increase muscle tone through exercise, or decrease it with massage or stretching. The reason this has only short-term or lack-lustre results is that these are temporary remedies that do nothing to change underlying, natural muscle tone.
The Afferent Input Practitioner starts with FULL ASSESSMENT of muscle tone, including neurological and orthopaedic testing. If areas of low muscle tone (inhibition) or increased tone (tightness or spasm) are found, the practitioner changes sensory input until tone is normal and then uses whatever treatment is necessary to make those changes permanent.
Imagine jumping off a chair onto the ground. At the moment of impact, certain muscles start to stretch, activating hugely increased firing of the sensors located in those muscles. Those messages are sent to the cord and immediately return to the muscle, increasing its tone, power and strength allowing you to NOT fall on the floor, sprain your ankle or dislocate your knee.
Imagine now you do that same jump but this time you land in bare feet on broken glass. A different reflex (the withdrawal reflex) would prevent your quadriceps from contracting because the withdrawal reflex produces INHIBITION of the quadriceps and FACILITATION of the hamstrings. The withdrawal reflex would normally prevent injury by stopping you from pushing your foot through a nail now CAUSES injury by removing strength from the muscles you need.
It turns out many persistent illnesses and injuries are caused by muscle inhibition caused by faulty AFFERENT Input.
An Afferent Input practitioner looks at the output of the muscles. Where that output is found to be deficient or inhibited, the practitioner can search for a solution which involves either removing the cause of the faulty input or in some cases providing input that is deficient.
Simon is available at the Naturality Wellness Centre in Berkhamsted on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Treatment is centred around muscle testing to formulate a diagnosis and a plan for treatment which may involve the removal of foreign bodies (especially metal), gentle manipulation, exercise, nutrition, or environmental change.
Special interest is in sports injuries, sports performance, chronic pain and disability.
