Alison Loram Muscle Function Research Published

Alison Loram is a BAPAM-registered Alexander Technique teacher with expertise in the technique’s application to performance and practice, and ergonomics of instrumental playing/singing. She is a graduate of UCL’s Performing Arts Medicine MSc, violinist and research scientist. Her current research work investigates muscle function and motor control, and strategies of changing habits associated with chronic pain, injury and performance limitation.

The first of the papers directly associated with this research has recently been published, and is open-access. You can read the paper here:

Proactive selective inhibition targeted at the neck muscles: this proximal constraint facilitates learning and regulates global control.

Other articles explaining and verifying the techniques used in the experiments and analysis have also been published. For example, the use of ultrasound imaging to determine the change in neck muscle activity was completely novel and so the method had to be set out, explained and the analyses processes, not just of the data but of the images themselves, had to be documented, peer-reviewed and published.

The technical paper Real-Time Ultrasound Segmentation, Analysis and Visualisation of Deep Cervical Muscle Structure is also open access.