Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®

Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy® was created by the same woman responsible for bringing fitness to the national fore in the 1950s. Bonnie helped her children and friends exercise in the afternoons, because she believed that children didn't get enough physical activity in school, and most Americans didn't get enough exercise, period. After using a well-respected 90-second test on children around the world to judge their ability to move, she found that while only 8% of children tested from some European countries failed, children from Central America failed more often, but a whopping 58% of American children failed. She took the “Report that Shocked the President” about this test straight to President Eisenhower. He mentioned it in his State of the Union address, the President's Council on Physical Fitness was formed and is still part of children's schooling today.

Bonnie was responsible for many other American fitness firsts. She wrote the first physical fitness book, then went on to make the first nationally televised exercise shows, made six exercise albums and wrote 18 more books. She created numerous physical fitness and exercise programs in schools, clubs, camps, hospitals and even prisons and mental institutions. Bonnie created the first pre-natal and post-natal programs in the United States, the first baby swim program, the first exercise classes for elderly, the first mother-and-baby exercise classes, and scores of programs for the Girl's Club and the YMCA. And he did all this before developing Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy®.

Her Myotherapy is based on John F. Kennedy's former White House physician's trigger point injection therapy. In 1976, Bonnie was examining a woman who had been receiving this type of therapy, and she discovered that when put pressure on the woman's trigger points, it relieved her pain. She dove into the study of this phenomenon the same way she enthusiastically did everything else, and several months later she introduced Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy® to the world.

Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy® improves circulation and alleviates pain by applying pressure to a muscle for a few to several seconds with either th fingers, knuckles or elbows. The patient first must be cleared by a health care provider who has mad sure the pain isn't pathological and requiring medical treatment. Then the patient wears loose clothing, without shoes, and is examined upon a table for trigger points, which are simply spots in a muscle that are prone to irritation, usually after there has been some sort of damage or trauma to the muscle. Prudden, along with trigger point injection therapists, believes that when a person is stressed, it affects these trigger points and causes painful muscle spasms. The pressure basically reeducates the muscle.

Bonnie Prudden Myotherapy® doesn't stop there. The pressure allows the muscle to be reconditioned, but then corrective exercises are used to fully retrain it. Applying this pressure and exercising a muscle into a new pattern are key, and they're taught in books and videos put out by Bonnie, so more people can life a pain-free life.

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