What is Muscle Testing and How to Use it

The basis of Emotional Complex Clearing (e.c.c.) is muscle testing or kinesiology. Muscle testing is a curious phenomenon that has been around for about sixty years. It is based on the premise that under certain conditions, a muscle (usually the deltoid) will hold strong or go weak, when tested (or pushed down) by someone else in order to respond to a question. This is not a function of strength, but of energy that is independent of conscious beliefs or defenses. This is not a trick, but a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be demonstrated with just about anyone.

It was developed by a chiropractor and is used these days mostly by chiropractors, acupuncturists, and nutritionists. Many health practitioners use either Applied Kinesiology or Touch For Health. Very few therapists do muscle testing, which is a shame, for it can be used to create a signaling system that is both reliable and valid to obtain yes or no answers from the client’s inner self. Recently, one controlled study demonstrated the effectiveness of using muscle testing to guide dream interpretation to curb the frequency of recurring dreams.

If you’ve never before experienced muscle testing, get a friend to help you and take the positions shown in the illustration below.

Let’s say that your friend Mary is the one on the right and you are about to muscle test her.

1. Tell her to “Hold,” (to resist your downward pressure) and then push down with the flat of your hand on her arm just above her wrist. Hold for about two seconds and then release. Two to three pounds of pressure should be sufficient. What you both should experience is a strong response. That means her arm may go down just a little, but then it will lock in place.
2. Do this several times to get a sense of her general muscle strength or resistance. This is called “testing in the clear.” That means you are not using muscle testing at this point to assess or access any particular issue.
3. Tell her to say, “My name is Mary.” After she makes that statement, tell her to “Hold,” and press down on her arm, just as before. The two of you should again experience a strong response. This indicates the statement she made was true. See illustration #2. (It looks a lot like illustration #1.)
   
4. Now tell her to say a name that is not her name. For instance, “Say, ‘my name is Alexandra.'” After she repeats that statement, tell her to “Hold,” and again press down on her arm, just as before. But now her arm should go weak, indicating a false response. In other words, try as hard as she might, Mary will probably find that she cannot resist the same downward pressure you applied before, and her arm will sink “inexplicably” toward the floor. See illustration #3.
   
5. You can repeat this procedure with obvious true-false statements, and the results of the testing will likely be the same. For instance, have Mary say, “I’m a woman,” vs. “I’m a man,” and then, “I’m standing up,” vs. “I’m sitting down.” Since the first statement in each pair is true, Mary’s response should again be strong to each. But since the second statement in each set is false, Mary will likely test weak to each of those. Be sure to make your test statements obviously true or false. This way you will get an unequivocally strong or weak response.

Muscle testing is a skill, not an art, nor yet a science. You are simply doing a natural form of biofeedback without a machine. With a little practice most people will soon be able to get results that are convincing, compelling, and quite exciting. Once this signalling system is set up, you are ready to ask more useful questions.

Advantages of Muscle Testing

Let’s say your friend Mary is disturbed, troubled, or depressed. Let’s assume also that you know that she comes from a troubled background and, although she may have tried psychotherapy several times, didn’t gain much benefit.

Moreover, muscle testing will cut through denial and allow you to check out your judgments, interpretations, and intuitions. Muscle testing will also minimize or eliminate resistance because the responses are so observable and unmistakable. This serves to bypass a lot of guesswork and disagreement.

By using muscle testing, Mary becomes more of a participant in the process. Instead of your interpreting or explaining her issues to her, the two of you together can embark on a journey of rapid discovery, locating exactly what is important and weeding out the irrelevant.

This saves a tremendous amount of time and energy. Mary can even “tune out” consciously and you will still get answers from a deeper level of her being.

When Muscle testing is first used, Mary’s arm “inexplicably” weakens, she may claim, “You just pushed harder!” It may be only when she has the opportunity to use muscle testing on someone else that she’ll realize that the pressure on their outstretched arm is roughly the same.

Because her muscle testing responses are involuntary, you are often not working on what Mary thinks she needs or what she says she needs. You are not even working on what you think she needs. Instead, you are working on what that deeper part of her says she needs, which is what she really and truly needs. The validation of this is that when you locate an issue with muscle testing and then move Mary through it, she will experience a sense of relief and release.

To produce real change, unconscious barriers must be accessed and released. Muscle testing is a safe, non-invasive, and even forgiving technique that will allow you to do this.