DCT stands for Dynamic Contraction Technique™. Dynamic Contraction Technique™ is a form of resistance stretching that is similar to but applicably different than the variation of PNF (Proprioceptive Nueromuscular Faciliation) known as Combining Isotonics. DCT™ more simply put uses a sustained muscle contraction throughout a joint’s full range of motion to break up scar tissue (adhesions) and restore active contraction and strength to the target muscles. DCT™ is one of the premier methods used by professional athletes and trainers/therapists all over the world.
DCT™ works by isolating a muscle using concentric contractions to recruit specific muscle fibers until a perceivable “burning” sensation is felt. Once the intended muscle is activated (burning), an isometric contraction is used to maintain the neurological connection to the activated muscle tissue while transitioning into an eccentric contraction. The eccentric contraction is the means by which DCT™ exercises facilitate the release of both muscle and fascial tension. The mechanism of the DCT™ resides in the unique mechanical function of the eccentric contraction. When muscle tissue is sufficiently targeted/activated around areas of tension in the body and then subjected to an eccentric contraction there is a distinct translation of an external force to that of an internal force directly opposing the area of restriction in the muscle or fascia which releases the tension and restores function. This physiological phenomena allows the user of DCT™ to systematically reintegrate the muscle and fascial systems optimizing function and performance.
DCT™ is for anyone who is attempting to maximize functionality of their body while decreasing pain and the probability for future injury. DCT™ can be used to help address chronic or acute injuries or as part of a developmental program to increase flexibility and strength. There are very few limitations to the performance of DCT™. A DCT™ client or patient must have a desire to participate in their own healing process, and a basic kinesthetic awareness and level of communication is needed in order to learn the technique or have a session facilitated by a practitioner. As such the youngest client that can adequately perform DCT™ is typically 9 years old. The upper end of the age limit is related more to physical capacity and conditions that limit communication. To learn more about the specific demographics that can benefit from DCT™ see the About tab of our website.
DCT™ Practitioners are subject to their own licensure and must follow the regulations of their state with regard to using DCT™ therapeutically. DCT™ can be used as a form of exercise or preventative flexibility training by anyone without need for a therapeutic license. However, should DCT™ be used for the direct purpose of treating and alleviating a symptom or diagnosed dysfunction many states require that the facilitator of the treatment must hold a valid license to perform therapy on the human body. That being said, there is actually no difference in the training received from Harmonix Health by a DCT™ Practitioner who is a therapist vs. a DCT™ Practitioner who is a trainer. However there is a difference in their prior education and other certificates/licenses they hold. In general the best way to distinguish between the level of expertise within the DCT™ system is by the Level of DCT™ certification the practitioner holds. A level 4 DCT™ Practitioner will have significantly greater expertise in DCT™ than a Level 1, 2, or 3 Practitioner regardless of their status as a trainer or therapist. However, if you have an acute injury that requires licensed therapy then the DCT™ Therapist may have insight into your condition that a DCT™ Trainer may not.
DCT™ personal exercises can and should be performed daily. However, there is great benefit to be had from performing your DCT™ workouts 1-3 times per week. We like to encourage people to learn several DCT™ exercises at a time that are done daily for several minutes at a time, but longer DCT™ workouts have a greater benefit and do not need to be performed every day. As for how many assisted DCT™ sessions from a DCT Practitioner should be received in a week the answer depends very much on what you are trying to accomplish. Typically for resolving chronic injuries like Lower back pain or neck pain we recommend a minimum of 1 x per week until the pain begins to resolve. Assisted DCT™ sessions should not be performed more than 3 x per week unless you are an elite athlete or are blending your assisted work with learning the personal DCT™ exercises. The body requires time to recover from the intense and sometimes radical changes achieved during each session. A good rule of thumb is to treat an assisted DCT™ session like a weigh lifting workout. The personal exercises on the other hand can be performed daily or even twice daily to mitigate tension that forms from your daily activities.
DCT™ can be used as both a warm up and a cool down. If performed before exercise, it will make muscles more active. It will also allow them to work at greater ranges. If DCT™ is performed before explosive exercise (sprinting, throwing, plyometrics, etc.) it is always best to make sure the intensity of each DCT™ exercise is mild so as to avoid over-lengthening a targeted muscle. Creating greater length in a muscle requires time for the muscle to heal and re-establish strength at the newly gained ROM. After exercise, DCT™ will allow for quicker recovery and reduced soreness.
DCT Private Sessions
Expect to learn a new way of thinking about flexibility and stretching. You can also expect to learn how to feel and experience the 3 different phases of DCT™ (Strength, Transition, and Stretch). You will leave your first session feeling profoundly different in your body and will likely have a sense of excitement regarding what is truly possible in terms of feeling healthy and living without pain. Lastly, you will wonder why no one ever explained these simple ideas about flexibility to you before.
A full DCT™ session is usually 1 hour and blends Barefoot Shiatsu with assisted as well as personal DCT™ exercises. DCT™ sessions can be modified for almost any environment and time frame. Injury specific protocols can be facilitated in as little as 5-10 minutes when one particular area or body part is being isolated. More lengthy sessions are appropriate when teaching in a semiprivate format or when focusing more heavily on personal DCT™ exercises/workouts.
Exercise clothing are usually the best outfit to wear to a DCT™ session. However if you forget your workout gear you can perform your DCT™ exercises in loose fitting regular clothes (No Skinny Jeans or Skirts though…)
Barefoot Shiatsu is form of therapeutic massage work where a practitioner uses their feet instead of their hands to provide a percussive pressure to the muscles of the body. The purpose for using the feet instead of the hands is both for effectiveness and self-preservation. Many forms of massage that require the use of a practitioner’s hands will result in excessive wear and tear on the joints of the fingers and wrists. The feet are designed for walking over the course of a person’s life and can tolerate the abuse of repetitive activities. Longevity is paramount to the education program for DCT™. We pride ourself in providing one of the most ergonomically sound and biomechanically evolved educational programs. As for the effectiveness of Barefoot Shiatsu, all it takes is one session to realize how much leverage and pressure a practitioner has when standing on a muscle of the body. We like to say that we ruin people who like the traditional Swedish oil massage, after your first DCT™ session you will be asking your masseuse to climb up on the massage table and walk on you!
Massage is used in a DCT™ session in order to facilitate blood and fluid movement through the muscles and connective tissue that will be used during the session. The Barefoot Shiatsu method allows a DCT™ Practitioner to artificially pump blood through areas that are restricted by muscle and/or fascial tension. Blood carries oxygen and nutrients through the body, when tension exists in muscles and connective tissue then blood can’t profuse and deliver these nutrients to the restricted tissues. This means that the tissue that is deprived of blood will literally suffocate and starve to death creating deep investing layers of scar tissue in the body. The percussive style of massage employed by DCT™ Practitioners helps warm the tissue up and prepare the body for the muscle recruitment needed during a DCT™ session. At the end of a DCT™ session massage is used to help pump the waste products that were released during the exercises out of the muscles and into the lymph system to be processed and then sent to the filters of the body for disposal.
In order to understand posture and alignment it helps to imagine the body as a house. The hips are like the foundation of the house. You can imagine that if we were to twist the foundation of a house that everything above it would be affected. The windows would break, the floor boards would snap and pop up, and the doorways would slant at odd angles. The same is true of the human body! Our hips can be twisted by the muscles that attach from the legs to the pelvis. As such if your hamstrings and gluteus muscles, which attach on the back and bottom of your pelvis, get tight then they pull your butt down and underneath you causing your upper back to hunch and your shoulders to roll forward and in collapsing your chest. When the shoulders are held out of alignment by the tension in the hips there is an incredible amount of wear and tear that occurs at the ligaments and tendons of the shoulder. Much in the same way that the foundation of the crooked house must be fixed before the windows, floors, and doors, so too does the tension in the hips and legs need to be addressed before the shoulders can be fixed. Otherwise any adjustments attempted on the shoulder girdle would simply revert back to a state of mal-alignment. DCT™ Practitioners are trained to identify the root causes of biomechanical alignment issues and to unwind these tension patterns systematically restoring proper function and alignment to the body.
Most recipients of DCT™ leave feeling “taller” and “looser”. This feeling tends to stay put for up to a week. The more one receives DCT™, the more permanent the changes to the body will be. Due to the fact that DCT™ exercises break down adhesions within muscles, periods of soreness may be experienced. In the very rare occurrence of a “flair up” or continued discomfort, one should reconnect with their DCT™ practitioner to discuss their symptoms and to allow the practitioner to take note of the exercises that were performed during the session and determine which exercises should be modified or avoided in future sessions.
The best way to support and bolster the effects of your DCT™ session is to learn and perform personal DCT™ exercises. Often your first session will focus primarily on a facilitated experience of DCT™ in order to help you learn what each phase of a DCT™ exercise should feel like. Once you have had a facilitated experience of DCT™ the personal exercises can be more easily learned and retained. Learning a DCT™ workout that is specific to your needs from your DCT™ Practitioner or at a DCT™ workshop is a great way to more quickly achieve your functional goals.
Modality Comparisons:
Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) is a form of assisted resistance stretching that has been around since the 1940’s. It was originally used in the rehabilitation of individuals suffering from paralysis and or muscle disorders because of its neurological effects on the body. Proprioception is knowing where a joint is located in space. For example, if you closed your eyes and someone lifted your arm out to the side and bent your elbow to ninety degrees you would be able to tell them that your elbow was bent without looking. Neuromuscular facilitation is referring to the fact that ultimately it is signals from your brain that stimulate muscle contractions. Here is how PNF is performed and the theory behind why and how it works. The practitioner picks a muscle they would like to stretch on their patient/client like the hamstring muscle. They then lengthen that muscle and ask the patient to resists against them using that muscle. In the case of the hamstring the patient would be lying on their back with one leg lifted by the therapist and they would be kicking their heel into the therapist’s hand for resistance. The therapist does not let the leg move forcing the patient to hold and isometric contraction for 5-6 seconds. The therapist then places their hands on the front of the foot/leg and asks the client to pull their leg towards their chest against resistance. Again an isometric contraction is held for 5-6 seconds. Finally the therapist returns their hands to the heel and asks the client to relax while they move their leg into a deeper stretch. The process can be repeated indefinitely continually providing more and more range of motion (ROM). With PNF the range of motion that is gained is due mostly to a neurological effect where activating two groups of muscles that are in an agonist and antagonist relationship(means one muscle does the exact opposite action that the other one does) causes relaxation of tone in the target muscles. As soon as the muscle undergoes stress the tone will return and the range of motion that was gained will be lost. This does not mean that the method lacks value, actually, it is an extremely effective way to accomplish exactly what the name describes, “Proprioceptive Nuromuscular Facilitation.” PNF essentially helps reestablish a connection between the mind and body relative to joint function at different ranges of motion. This is very different than removing muscle tension, and very different in practice than DCT™. DCT™ utilizes three different muscle contractions to remove tension from muscles. Let’s compare the PNF hamstring stretch described above to that of a DCT™ exercise. A DCT™ Practitioner would allow the client to perform hamstring extensions by resisting them at the heel but allowing them to slowly kick their leg down to the floor. This is a concentric contraction that builds strength in the hamstrings of the client. The concentric contractions will be repeated until the client begins to feel fatigue or a burn in the target muscles. Once fatigued, the Practitioner will have the client hold an isometric contraction at the smallest range of motion (with the heel close to the floor). The isometric contraction is used to further isolate the hamstrings and to make sure that the muscle tissue remains engaged as the Practitioner begins to push the clients leg towards their chest against the clients resistance. This is an eccentric contraction and is actually the phase of a DCT™ exercise where tension is removed from a muscle. (See Lesson 3 in the How my Body Works section of our website) A DCT™ exercise recruits muscle tissue that is around areas of tension (knots), maintains the activation, and then forces the muscle to pull against itself removing the muscle tension from the inside out. This is a physiological phenomenon and has immediate and lasting physiological effects on the body
Active Release Technique (ART) is a form of manual therapy where a muscle is targeted by a therapist and pressure is applied using their thumbs, forearms, elbows, or a wooden/plastic dowel while the client performs specific movements that the targeted muscle aids in performing. This is an exceptionally effective technique for increasing mobility within a joint and or giving muscles more freedom of movement. Here again, however, it is important to distinguish exactly what this technique is doing. Many would claim that it is releasing muscle tension based on the results that ART professionals achieve during their sessions. The truth of the matter is that ART actually works on the Fascia or connective tissue that is located locally within a muscle, and on specific neurological trigger points found in the muscle. This is a powerful combination in addressing many chronic and acute pain issues that arise in the body. The fascia is profoundly connected to movement. (See Lesson 4 in the How my Body Works section of our website) If the fascia becomes restricted then muscle tissue has less room in which to do its job. By pressing down hard on a specific point in a muscle the ART therapist is effectively pinning the fascia to the bone at that location and then having the client move their body part, let’s say an arm, contracting the muscle around the point that is pinned to the bone. This essentially peals the pinned fascia away from the surrounding muscle tissue alleviating referred neurological pain associated with the trigger point as well as giving the muscle more space in which to contract functionally. DCT™ works with Fascia in a very different but equally effective way. DCT™ Practitioners first remove muscle tension in target muscle groups by using eccentric muscle contractions. Once the muscle tension has been addressed this allows the joint to function properly so that more complex stretching positions can be used safely. Isometric and eccentric contractions are then used to separate the Fascia from the muscles and surrounding tissues. DCT™ fascial stretching is achieved by having the client position their body such that their limbs are pulling tension bilaterally or from their lowerbody to their upperbody. (See Lesson 4 in the How my Body Works section of our website) An example a DCT™ fascial stretching position would be a deep lunge position where the therapist raises the clients back leg while they are in the lunge to isolate the fascia in the front of the thigh and hip. DCT™ does not ignore the important distinction between muscle tension and fascial tension, and by being able to address both systems independently it allows for a more lasting and permanent shift in movement patterns and biomechanical alignment.
Active Isolated Stretching (AIS) is a form of rehabilitative exercise and assisted therapy techniques developed by Aaron Mattes. The technique involves holding different positions for no longer than two seconds at a time utilizing a physiological relaxation response in muscle tissue. AIS works in a similar fashion as PNF, allowing increases in range of motion without removing the underlying muscle tension that is causing the restricted range of motion in the muscle. This method has tremendous value in informing the client in neuromuscular reeducation, and the body positions are very safe and ergonomic allowing individuals at any level of restriction to perform the exercises. DCT™ also uses very safe positions for assisted and individually performed exercises. This is really the only similarity between the two modalities, DCT™ approaches each muscle by activating and recruiting muscle fibers(via concentric contractions), retaining the isolated muscle fibers (via isometric contractions), and then removing muscle tension (via eccentric muscle contractions). DCT™ Practitioners are also taught to use DCT™ exercises as a diagnostic tool, following the tension patterns that are unique to each client/patient. This is accomplished by allowing communication and client/patient feedback to guide each session. Every DCT™ client/patient is taught about their condition as well as how the exercises function to remove tension so that during their session they can direct the practitioner effectively, allowing a more precise and safe removal of tension. DCT™ provides a new paradigm of therapy where communication is the bottom line and empowerment the ultimate goal. Because such a high level of resistance and control is required to perform a DCT™ exercise it is impossible to be a passive participant during a session. The therapist really just acts as a tool facilitating the experience that is being guided by the sensations experienced by the client. This lends itself to quick and profound results for which credit is given to the client due to their willingness to participate with full attention.