What Your Nervous System Is Trying to Tell You: The Power of the sEMG Scan
When it comes to understanding how your nervous system is functioning, most people are only given two options: how you feel, or what the problem looks like on an X-ray or MRI.
But what if we could measure how well your nervous system is actually working—in real time?
That’s where Surface Electromyography (sEMG) comes in.
Just like an EKG measures the electrical activity of the heart and an EEG maps brain wave patterns, sEMG measures the electrical output of the sensory-motor system, giving us a clear, measurable picture of how your nervous system is adapting to stress.
🧠 What Does sEMG Actually Measure?
sEMG detects the neurological signals traveling from the brain to the small, intrinsic postural muscles that line the spine. These muscles aren’t for strength—they’re for precision.
Dr. Heidi Haavik describes these spinal muscles as “calibrators”—like the gyroscope inside your phone that adjusts when you rotate the screen. These tiny muscles are constantly communicating with the brain, helping it understand body position, movement, and orientation in space.
When the nervous system is under stress, the output to these muscles becomes uncoordinated, fatigued, and imbalanced. This leads to postural distortion, poor balance, inefficient movement patterns, and a brain that’s no longer getting accurate sensory input from the body.
📊 What Do Amplitude and Symmetry Tell Us?
sEMG scans measure two main things:
Amplitude – How much energy is the brain using to communicate with the spinal muscles?
Symmetry – Is that energy balanced side to side, or is the body compensating?
Healthy nervous systems use minimal energy to maintain posture and coordination. But when there’s stress, injury, trauma, or subluxation, the brain has to work overtime. This leads to overactive or underactive muscle patterns, visible on the scan.
Think of it like this:
High amplitude = the nervous system is using more effort to perform simple tasks.
Low amplitude = the nervous system may be disconnected or fatigued.
Asymmetry = the brain is compensating, shifting posture or tone to protect itself.
These readings give us deep insight into your body’s adaptive efficiency—how well it’s regulating energy, responding to stress, and maintaining balance.
🧬 Why Does This Matter for Health and Healing?
When your nervous system is in constant fight-or-flight mode—or stuck in protection and compensation patterns—it starts using energy inefficiently. This creates a ripple effect across your entire body:
Poor posture and movement become hardwired
Immune function and digestion decline
Fatigue, focus issues, and emotional dysregulation increase
The brain struggles to accurately interpret the body and environment
Over time, these patterns show up as chronic symptoms, developmental challenges, or behavioral struggles, especially in kids.
sEMG doesn’t just help us find where the stress is—it helps us track how the body is healing. It allows us to see how subluxation is interfering with neuro-motor output and how chiropractic care is restoring function.
🔬 What the Research Says
Chiropractic adjustments have been shown to improve sensory-motor integration, balance, posture, and coordination—all of which are visible on the EMG scan.
In fact, a 2015 randomized controlled trial by Dr. Heidi Haavik, Dr. Kelly Holt, and colleagues showed that chiropractic care significantly improved sensorimotor function and reduced fall risk in older adults.
📚 Holt, K., Haavik, H., Lee, A.C.L., Murphy, B., & Raina Elley, R. (2015). Effectiveness of chiropractic care to improve sensorimotor function associated with falls risk in older people: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 39(4), 267–278. Read the study here
Their findings support what we see every day in practice: when the brain can receive better input, it produces better output.
🧠 The Big Takeaway: Your Nervous System Can Rewire and Heal
At the end of the day, sEMG is more than just a scan—it’s a real-time look at how your nervous system is functioning, adapting, and changing through care. It reveals the story behind your child’s behaviors, posture, focus, or coordination challenges. It shows us how deeply stress has been stored and how the body is trying to compensate.
But here’s the hope: the nervous system is changeable.
Thanks to neuroplasticity—your brain and nervous system’s ability to rewire and create new, healthier patterns—chiropractic adjustments provide the input the brain needs to reorganize, heal, and function more efficiently. As we reduce subluxation patterns and restore proper communication, the EMG helps us track those changes over time and celebrate the wins, big and small.
👉 The more efficient the nervous system becomes, the more capacity your child has to regulate, grow, and thrive. And that’s what makes this work so life-changing.
📅 Ready to See How Your Nervous System Is Functioning?
Whether you’re looking for answers about your child’s development or your own energy, focus, and resilience, an Insight sEMG scan is the place to start.
📞 Call us to schedule your scan and get real answers—so you can move forward with confidence and clarity.
