What You'll Master

✓ The Myotatic and Inverse Myotatic Reflexes

These reflexes govern how muscles respond to sudden, high load. Understanding them reveals why trauma creates a direction-specific instability — and why it persists long after the pain resolves.

✓ Why Tonic and Phasic Muscles Recover Differently

Phasic muscles bounce back in hours. Tonic muscles can take weeks or months to recover — and often, at the specific joint traumatised, they don't fully recover at all. This differential recovery is the mechanism behind chronic joint dysfunction.

✓ Gain Shifts Post-Trauma

Before injury, gain is 1.0 — a balanced response to load. After trauma, gain drops below 1.0 in the affected tonic muscles. The same stimulus now produces a lesser response. Compensation fills the gap, but the underlying deficit remains.

✓ Trauma Biomechanics and the Vector of Failure

High-velocity trauma travels in a vector. That vector predicts exactly which tonic muscles were inhibited and in which direction. You'll learn to use a patient's trauma history and force vectors to identify hidden instability — and understand why that joint can no longer return to neutral on its own.

Who Should Attend

• Practitioners whose patients have a trauma history that seems to drive their current presentation

• Clinicians who want to understand why structural findings persist long after tissue healing

• Practitioners looking to connect injury biomechanics to specific assessment findings

• Students and recent graduates building a neurologically-informed clinical framework from the ground up

What Makes This Different

Most approaches to trauma focus on what's damaged — the disc, the ligament, the facet. Treatment targets the structure, and when the structure heals, the case is considered closed.

But trauma doesn't just damage tissue. It triggers a protective reflex that alters the gain of the tonic muscles at the affected joint — in a specific direction, often permanently. That neurological change is invisible to structural assessment. And it's still there long after the imaging is clear.

This webinar gives you the biomechanical and neurophysiological framework to understand what trauma actually does to the control system. You'll see why the direction of the original force matters, why tonic muscles recover on a completely different timeline than phasic muscles, and why a joint can appear structurally sound while still carrying a vector of failure that drives every subsequent presentation.

It's not about what broke. It's about what the nervous system did to protect itself — and why that protection became the problem.

About the Presenter

Dr. Russ Hornstein, DC has been a chiropractic neurologist for 30 years and holds his Diplomate in Functional Neurology from the Carrick Institute. He developed Adjusting to Neutral to address the root cause of persistent musculoskeletal and sensorimotor problems through tonic system recalibration.