Muscle Testing and PSYCH-K®

In this blog we will look at what muscle testing is, why we use muscle testing in PSYCH-K®, which disciplines already use muscle testing, how many people are trained to use muscle testing, how accurate and precise muscle testing is, what the mechanism behind muscle testing is and what is tested with muscle testing. Finally, we also specifically look at how testing is done in PSYCH-K® and what we test for in PSYCH-K®.

In this article we talk about muscle testing to evaluate neural control, not the strength of the muscle itself. In this way of muscle testing usually 1 muscle group is used repeatedly. This way the presence or absence of certain conditions can be determined. Like stress or the absence of a supportive belief. A physiotherapist or chiropractor will look at the strength of a muscle. This is not the subject of this blog.

In PSYCH-K® we want to know whether a certain belief is already believed by the subconscious or not. For example, the belief “I am worthwhile” might not be believed by the subconscious and the muscle test will then indicate a weak response. However, if you are in conversation with a person about ‘being worthwhile’ he will be able to think of many reasons with his conscious mind why he is worthwhile. However, if his subconscious mind does not completely believe it, he will always feel uncertain about it. The feeling and the content of the belief are not aligned. In a therapeutic conversation you are usually in conversation with someone’s conscious mind and the change also takes place on the conscious level. Since the subconscious is in charge 95% of the time, it is important that the subconscious is aligned with the wisdom of your conscious mind. For this reason it is necessary to transform the belief at the subconscious level

Anne Jensen (2015) has investigated which disciplines use standard muscle testing in their methodology and how many people are formally trained in muscle testing. She found that more than 79 disciplines already use muscle testing as a diagnostic method for many different conditions. Examples of this are: Touch for Health, HeartSpeak, Contact Reflex Analysis, Total Body Modification and of course PSYCH-K.®.

Anne Jensen estimates that over 1 million people worldwide have already been trained to use muscle testing. The way in which they use muscle testing and what muscle testing is used for can vary greatly from method to method.

Anne Jensen (PhD thesis for Oxford, 2014) has conducted research into the validity of muscle testing. How accurate and precise is muscle testing? To investigate the validity of muscle testing, participants expressed truths and untruths. She did this under various conditions. For example, if muscle testing was used to determine whether something was true or not, the clinical intuition of the therapist was used (without muscle testing). This means that the feeling of the therapist says: the truth is being told or not.  Deviation governed by chance was also investigated. It turned out that muscle testing scored significantly better than just the intuition of the therapist or simply chance. So at this moment it seems that muscle testing is a better instrument than (or at least a valuable addition to) the therapeutic conversation. Much more research is needed before we can really draw this conclusion. In any case, it is intriguing and corresponds with my own clinical experience in my practice.

The basic assumption of muscle testing is that when there is an abnormal input from the nervous system into a muscle, the muscle shows weakness when pressure is applied to it. The origin and cause of this irregular neurological input is still unclear. There is still a fierce debate about this. Practically speaking, most people find it very easy to experience this difference between a strong and a weak muscle test. So we don’t know why; we know it’s there. Several researchers have investigated this. I like to compare it with gravity. We still do not know exactly how gravity works, but nobody doubts that there is gravity, because we can easily experience and demonstrate that.

What muscle testing is used for differs from discipline to discipline. In some disciplines, it is used to test for allergies, food intolerances, the presence of stress, which stone is good for your aura, in which year your emotional problems arose or which organs need attention. To assess how useful this is, it is necessary to look at each discipline separately. It is important to look at how muscles are tested and why.

Each discipline does muscle testing differently. In PSYCH-K®, testing takes place in pairs. The person who supervises is called the Facilitator and the person who transforms is the Partner.

In PSYCH-K® you can basically use any muscle for testing. In general, the deltoid muscle (the large muscle in the upper arm) is used. The Partner sticks out her arm with the elbow stretched out to the side, the Facilitator then gives a light and constant pressure on the arm just above the wrist. The result of the muscle test is binary: strong or weak. Either the arm stays in place (strong)

or moves downward (weak). The Partner may experience differences in weakness (more or less), but that is not important for our purposes. We want to know if there is stress in the system, and every weakness response indicates there is. Whether this is 20% stress or 80% stress is not important. After all, you don’t want any stress in your body at all.

In PSYCH-K® we use muscle testing to communicate with the subconscious as clearly and unambiguously as possible. We test for the presence of stress, whether a belief is true or false to a person’s entire system and a simple yes/no communication. By the whole system I mean a person’s conscious and subconscious mind. See my blog about the three levels of consciousness.

Fortunately, there is already quite some research into the use of muscle testing. And this research is cautiously positive. More research is needed and I encourage it. Muscle testing is better than the therapeutic conversation on which the clinical intuition of the therapist is based. In short, it is the best we have right now. The best way to distinguish between the conscious mind and the existing programming in the subconscious mind.

Jensen, A. M., Stevens, R., & Burls, A. (2014). Developing the evidence for kinesiology-style manual muscle testing: A series of diagnostic test accuracy studies.

Jensen, A. M. (2015). Estimating the prevalence of use of kinesiology-style manual muscle testing: A survey of educators. Advances in Integrative Medicine, 2(2), 96-102.

Monti, D.A., Sinnott, J., Marchese, M., Kunkel, E.J.S., Greeson, J.M. (1999) Muscle test comparisons of congruent and incongruent self-referential statements. Perceptual Motor Skills, 88 (3), 1019-1028.