Neural Glides
Neural Glides and Neural Flossing are two terms referring to the same movement strategy. I decided a few years back to make the switch from referring to this movement tool as neural flossing to neural glides for a few reasons:
I love the adjective “glide” in reference to human movement. I want my tissues to have a gliding quality and this includes my nerves
Many people don’t love flossing but do it out of habit or necessity, or they neglect to do it. I don’t want them to associate a physical body movement to a daily task they don’t enjoy doing
While yes, commonly I’m encouraging my clients to do their glides at home with regularity such as flossing, if they have a negative association with dental flossing, I don’t want to associate a neural glide to their dental flossing
Neural Glides are an incredibly gentle and effective way to help ease neural tension, restore the quality of glide to human movement, and assist in what you might be observing as range of motion restrictions or deficient ease of movement. You might be doing neural glides in your movement or bodywork modality without even realizing it!
However, in order to have depth of understanding and the ability to assess and apply neural glides effectively, it’s important to understand the function of the peripheral nervous system and what could be causing neural tension, along with learning about assessments and glides for various nerves.
This information has been long missing from movement professionals and I don’t have a good reason for this. Hence me creating a mini-course on this important subject. Neural glides are taught to physical therapists and chiropractors but from the DPTs and DCs I’ve spoken with of varying career lengths and time away from school, the glides are taught casually and integrated into their other curriculum, not as a stand alone topic (please let me know if your experience was otherwise!). There are some options for continuing education on this subject but not all DPTs or DCs will necessarily do them.
Neural glides are so gentle in nature that they’re often less demanding than many other movements we ask of our clients. If you continue honoring an individual’s movement restrictions and keep your repetition count low, neural glides pose next to no risk. In terms of restrictions, I mean to say that if it is inappropriate for a client to do spinal flexion, you would modify a neural glide to omit spinal flexion to make it safe and appropriate for them, for example.
Once you start learning about the mechanisms of neural tension and how to do neural glides, keep this items in mind to keep your neural glides as risk free as is possible:
refer out for any acute situations: pain that is affecting quality of life and ability to do daily living tasks
refer out for any acute injuries
when a glide is done correctly, in my experience, the less you feel the better. You don’t want to feel a strong pulling or stretching type of sensation, this would indicate to direct of a tension placed upon the given nerve
keep the repetition number low (7-15, arbitrary suggestion here) to see how a client responds. Too many repetitions can aggravate an already aggravated nerve
Keeping this in mind, introducing nerve glides has the potential to:
ease symptoms from neural tension
improve range of motion and flexibility for people with or without neural tension
improve ease of movement and quality of movement
improve daily comfort in physical body