Your Body Runs on Hardware and Software. We Work on Both.

Not long ago, at a community wellness event in the Hill Country, I had a long conversation with a practitioner from Austin whose healing work is built around muscle testing. It was one of the best conversations of the day, and it is the reason this piece exists. Because as we compared notes, something became clear to both of us: “muscle testing” meant something different in her office than it does in mine, and neither of us meant the version most people picture. If she’s reading this: thank you for the conversation that started it.

Here is what I found myself explaining that afternoon, and what I find myself explaining in my office every week. Muscle testing is not one thing. In my practice it is three distinct tools, used together, often in the same visit, sometimes in the same minute. To explain how they fit, I need to borrow an analogy from a chiropractor named Alan Beardall, and it is the single most useful picture of the body I know.

Hardware and software

Think about a car for a second. Part of what makes it run is parts and pieces: tires, brakes, transmission, gears. Another part is computers and wiring. All of it has to work for the vehicle to work, and a problem in the wiring can show up in the wheels.

Your body is built the same way. There is hardware: muscles, ligaments, tendons, joints, the physical tissues. And there is software: the neural system’s control programs, the ones deciding how much to fire each muscle, what to protect, what to shut down, moment to moment, without asking you first.

Beardall, who catalogued hundreds of specific muscle tests in the 1970s and 80s, described the body as a biological computer: binary at its outputs, running a master program whose one directive is survival, with levels of control that run from local reflexes through the spinal cord up to the brain. A muscle tests strong or weak. A spot is painful or it isn’t. Pain, weakness, and dysfunction are not random noise; in this model they are error messages from a system that is still running its survival program as written.

Here is why that matters for you. When you get injured, the hardware takes the hit, but the software responds: it tightens some muscles, powers down others, and rewrites your movement to protect the damage. Both layers are involved in the injury, and both are involved in the healing. Most care focuses on the hardware. The premise of my practice, Neural Pathway Integration, is simple to say: we work on both the hardware and the software. We use the hardware to read the software, and we treat through the hardware to change what the software is telling your muscles to do.

The three kinds of testing are how.

Test one: orthopedic muscle testing. The measurement.

The first tool is the one sports medicine and physical therapy have used for decades. It is muscle specific. Testing your gluteus medius, a hip muscle, requires one position and one direction of resistance. A peroneal muscle at the ankle requires another. A deltoid at the shoulder, another still. The muscle and its fiber direction dictate the test, and I am recording strength, timing, pain, and location, muscle by muscle, building a measured map of what is carrying its load and what has gone quiet.

This is where every visit starts and ends. We test, we treat, and then we test again, the same visit, so we both know whether something actually changed. I don’t assume a treatment worked. I check.

Test two: therapy localization. The pointer.

The second tool descends from George Goodheart’s discovery, and it solved a real problem: when several things are dysfunctional at once, what do you treat first?

Therapy localization works like this. A test that just failed gets re-run while the suspect structure is contacted, in Goodheart’s original version by the patient’s own hand, in my office usually mine. Say your shoulder is the complaint. Your anterior deltoid tests weak and painful, and your range of motion is restricted. I place a hand on the trapezoid ligament, near the collarbone, and re-test. If the shoulder suddenly moves further, and the deltoid tests stronger and without pain while that ligament is contacted, that structure just raised its hand. Then I treat that ligament, take my hand away, and run the same test one more time. If that ligament really was the problem, the test stays better with my hand gone.

That’s the rule I hold myself to with every patient: the body can point anywhere it wants, but the orthopedic test gets the final say.

Test three: bioenergetic testing. The triage.

The third tool is the one that raises eyebrows, so let me describe it plainly. Its job is the one every emergency room understands: of everything that’s wrong, what needs attention now, and in what order.

Instead of repositioning you for every muscle, I use one repeatable signal as a readout. Some practitioners use a straight-arm test. I usually prefer comparing leg length, which I read less as a muscle test and more as a signal of the body’s overall protective tension. Holding that signal steady, I change one variable at a time and watch whether the signal changes. Sometimes that variable is a touch. Sometimes it is a hand position, what Beardall called hand modes, specific finger positions that in his system stand for categories like muscle, ligament, or disc. The most important one in daily practice is called priority, and it asks the most clinically valuable question there is: of everything that is dysfunctional right now, does this one need treatment today?

People in my chair sometimes hear me call this “asking the body questions.” That is shorthand, not a claim. What is literally happening is the same thing happening in every other test in this article: a stimulus goes in through the body’s receptors, the neural system integrates it, and a response comes out. Eyes, ears, skin, pressure, position. Receptor, interpretation, response. That is the whole loop, and it is the same loop a reflex hammer uses.

I sometimes joke that this part of the work is like working with a large language model: the quality of the output depends on the quality of the question. Vague questions get useless answers. Precise questions, asked in the right order, get you somewhere.

There is, in fact, a whole decision tree behind that ordering, the sequence of questions I run on every patient to sort what’s blocking, what’s mechanical, and what gets treated today. It deserves its own article, and it will get one. For now, the headline is the job itself: triage.

Why not just fix everything you find?

Here is the philosophy underneath all of this, and it might be the most important paragraph on this page.

On any given day, a thorough exam will find more than one dysfunction in your body. So is my job to make every dysfunctional thing functional? I don’t think so. Much of what tests “dysfunctional” is compensation: the software’s deliberate workaround, protecting something else. If I removed every compensation I could find, I would not be helping you. I would be kicking the crutch out from under someone who is still healing.

This is exactly where the gap between healing and recovery lives. The work is not “find everything and treat it all.” The work is finding what actually needs to be treated, in the right order, at the right time, and leaving the body’s scaffolding alone until it is ready to come down. That is what the priority question exists for, and it is why I use bioenergetic testing at all. Orthopedic testing alone can define dysfunction beautifully. It cannot tell you which dysfunction is the problem and which is the protection.

What the treatment actually is

The therapy itself is stimulation to the hardware, delivered by hand, no drugs. The reflex points I treat are not interchangeable buttons; they have jobs, and the map goes back further than most people expect. In the 1930s an osteopath named Frank Chapman charted reflex points he associated with lymphatic drainage, the body’s fluid-clearing system. Around the middle of the last century a chiropractor named Terence Bennett mapped points he believed influenced circulation, studying them with the imaging of his day. Goodheart folded both into muscle testing in the 1960s, Beardall systematized it, and the lineage I trained in refined it from there: specific points, specific ligaments, specific muscles and neural pathways. In the catalog I work from, that adds up to roughly a thousand structures, each with its own reason to be touched.

Ligaments deserve a special word. Outside of surgery and injections, relatively few therapies are aimed directly at ligaments, and the body has hundreds of them. When a ligament is stretched or injured, truly or even as the body perceives it, the surrounding muscles tighten protectively to guard the joint that ligament should be stabilizing. Posture shifts, load patterns change, something gets irritated, and eventually a spot earns a diagnosis ending in “-itis.” Quiet that spot with an injection and, in my model, the original overstretched ligament keeps running the same program. In my model the symptom is the body’s answer to a problem, not the problem, and treating answers is how people stay stuck.

What I think is happening, labeled honestly

How does a light contact or a hand position change a muscle test somewhere else? The orthopedic side has well-described physiology: receptors, reflexes, protective inhibition (the body powering a muscle down to guard it). The bioenergetic side is harder, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I don’t see things, hear things, or feel things, and nothing supernatural happens in my office. My working theory, clearly labeled as a theory, is ordinary electromagnetism. Every cell generates electrical activity, and electrically active tissue generates fields; medicine already measures the heart’s and the brain’s electrical signals as routine diagnostics. When I am in contact with a patient, my best understanding is that I am interacting with a neural system that already knows where its problem is, through the most ordinary channels there are.

And if that theory turns out to be wrong, the practice stands anyway, because every answer has to show up in the measured re-test before I trust it. This is not energy healing, faith healing, or placebo theater. My background is kinesiology (the study of human movement) and biology, then chiropractic, then years of Advanced Muscle Integration Technique, now Neural Pathway Integration. It is anatomy all the way down.

Where the evidence stands

Orthopedic muscle testing is well supported: trained examiners grading specific, isolated muscles agree with each other at high rates, which is exactly why it anchors my visits.

The research on bioenergetic-style testing is genuinely mixed, and which studies you trust depends partly on a fair question about who should run them. Studies by experienced practitioners of the technique report strong agreement; critics respond that those researchers have a stake in the result. Independent studies are more skeptical, and reliability varies widely with which muscle is used and what is being asked. I think both sides have a point: skill in a manual art is real, and so is the need for outside checks. So where the research is thin, I don’t lean on it. I lean on the re-test, right there in the visit, where you and I can both see it.

What I treat, and what I don’t

When people hear all this, they often ask whether I treat more than muscles and joints. The answer is no. I am a chiropractor licensed in Texas, and my scope is the musculoskeletal system: muscles, ligaments, and the neural pathways that run them. That is what I evaluate and what I treat, by hand. The testing described here is how I find and prioritize that work, not a doorway to treating anything else.

If this resonates

I wrote this because it’s what I actually do, every day, with every patient, and I think you deserve to understand it before you’re ever in my office. If this picture makes sense to you, everything else we do here will make sense too.

To go deeper into the therapy itself, start with What is NPI? → And if you have been stuck between healed and recovered and want to talk about whether your situation fits this work, call or text the office at (737) 667-4486.