In physiology, medicine and anatomy, muscle tone (residual muscle tension or tonus) is the continuous and passive partial contraction of muscles, or the resistance of the muscle to passive stretching at rest. It helps maintain posture and decreases during REM sleep. When sudden pulling or stretching occurs, the body responds by automatically increasing muscle tension, a reflex that helps protect against danger and helps maintain balance. Such nearly continuous innervation can be thought of as a "default" or "steady state" state for muscles. Both extensor and flexor muscles are involved in maintaining a constant tonus at rest. In skeletal muscles, this helps maintain normal posture.
Muscle tone at rest varies along a bell-shaped curve. Low tone is seen as "lax, limp, flabby, mushy, dead weight" and high tone is seen as "tight, light, strong." Muscles with high tone are not necessarily strong and muscles with low tone are not necessarily weak. In general, low tone increases flexibility and decreases strength and high tone decreases flexibility and increases strength, but with many exceptions. A person with low tone will most likely not be able to perform "explosive" movements, as required in a sprinter or high jumper. These athletes usually have a high tone that falls within normal limits. A person with high tone will usually not be flexible in activities such as dance and yoga. Joint laxity contributes greatly to flexibility, especially with flexibility in one or a few areas, rather than overall flexibility.
For example, a person may have high tone with normal to poor flexibility in most areas, but be able to put the palms on the ground with straight knees because of hypermobile sacroiliac joints. It is important to assess different areas before deciding whether a person has high, low or normal muscle tone. A fairly reliable assessment item is how the person feels when picked up. For example, small children with low tone may feel heavy, while larger children with high tone may feel light, which fits the description of "dead weight."
Although cardiac and smooth muscles are not directly connected to the skeleton, they also have tonus in the sense that although their contractions do not match those of antagonistic muscles, the non-contractile state is characterized by (sometimes random) enervation.
Treatment BeterKlinic
BeterKliniek is the clinic for Integrative Medicine that bridges regular and non-regular medicine.
An van Veen (physician) and Michael van Gils (therapist) look for the cause of a condition or disease. That is where the treatment starts otherwise, as people often say, it is 'carrying water to the sea'. We call this cause medicine. Sometimes it is also desirable to treat the symptoms (at the same time). We call this symptom medicine.
Chronic disorders often have their cause in epi- genetics. You can schedule a free informative telephone consultation (phone number 040-7117337 until 1 p.m.) at BeterKliniek to discuss your symptoms so that we can provide you with further advice.
