Functional Neuromuscular Therapy 101

We love the fact that you clicked into this page — it shows us that you’re the kind of person who loves information and figuring things out and seeing if something is a good fit for you. Helping our clients take charge of their own healing and wellness is a HUGE focus for us, and those are the exact kinds of skills we want you to apply to your body and mind as we work together!

But let’s talk about FNMT for a minute so you can see how this all fits together. FNMT (which stands for Functional Neuromuscular Therapy) is a treatment modality that was created by Neuro Physique’s founder, Kavic Merrill. It combines neurolinguistic programming and specialized massage therapy to provide effective pain relief, improved mobility, and enhanced mental well-being. How does that look, exactly? Well, let’s start with the functional part of that equation first. 

Functional can have a few different meanings, but in the health and wellness sphere, it’s often used to talk about the idea of addressing the root cause of an issue, not just its surface symptoms. Here at Neuro Physique, we’re all about getting to the root cause of your pain and fixing it. We’re not about “managing” it or “keeping it at a tolerable level.” We’re looking at what’s actually causing it, and we’re going right to that. Functional also means that there is a response that can be generated to actually help the problem. In this case, we want our clients learning which actions to take to functionally respond to their own pain, and we also work as therapists to train their body tissues to functionally respond effectively on their own.

And how do we get there? That’s where the neuromuscular part comes in. We’ll deal with the ‘muscular’ part first since that’s what’s going to be more immediately familiar. Basically, we use specialized massage therapy techniques that are meant to train your tissues to relax, absorb, and distribute pressure and forces throughout your body more efficiently. 

This response has to be trained much like you would train if you were going to run a marathon. When you train to run, you teach your body by running over and over again to obtain desired breathing patterns and pace relaxation in order to get a PR (or personal record, for anyone outside the running world). So at Neuro Physique, your therapist will work the affected tissue over and over to train your body to respond more efficiently in the future when using that particular group of muscles/tissues. This helps resolve chronic and acute pain, as well as reduces your body’s risk of injury.

The ‘neuro’ part of the equation is what we actually talk about with you during a session, although it includes more than that since we’re basically trying to retrain your entire nervous system (of which your brain is an obviously important part). While we’re doing the deep tissue work on you, we’ll also be discussing ways you can reprogram your brain to think about pain more efficiently, which can help you to change negative thinking and activity patterns that are unconsciously perpetuating your pain without you even realizing it. By drawing your attention to it and teaching strategies for approaching challenging experiences and physical stimuli in a more positive way, we also help empower you to have the ability to more effectively reduce your own pain in the future.