Hi, folks. This is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Ken Best is on a call with me. Dr. Best is known as one of the top chiropractic physicians in L.A.

And he's not only the author of several different books, but he happens to specialize in something called muscle testing, which I get asked about a lot by podcast listeners.

And I'm personally very curious about just because it's something that I know that a lot of chiropractic physicians use.

And I see talked about all the time, but have really never dealt into on this podcast.

If there's one guy who really knows this stuff back and forth, it's Dr. Best. He actually works with a lot of celebrities down in L.A.

And it's been doing this a while. So as we're talking, if you're interested in checking out Ken's website is drkenbest.com.

And we're going to hone in here on muscle testing and also something called applied kinesiology. So Dr. Best, thank you for coming on the call today.

Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me. Well, let's just start right here. What exactly is muscle testing?

Well, I mean, muscle testing gets into the whole big group of things as far as what people relate to as being muscle testing.

The typical thing that a lot of people see is kind of the arm push down test, which is kind of as far as research goes.

It's not the most consistent test because you're not isolating one specific muscle when you're doing that.

So there's a lot of variability that can come in to doing a muscle test and that's where practice comes in.

So that arm test you're talking about, is that the one where you hold out your arm?

Yeah, typically you'll see somebody either put it out to the side or put it out in front of them at a 90 degree angle and you'll push down and see what kind of resistance you get.

So in real muscle testing, this Kendall and Kendall muscle testing, which is a standard for actually testing muscle strength and you know when you're evaluating a patient and that's looking at more atrophy and disconnect in the nervous system.

When we're talking about applied kinesiology muscle testing, which is what I do in my practice with sports injuries, is that we're testing the eccentric muscle contraction, which tests the feedback loop.

So you're testing more of the appropriate system of the body.

So you're testing really a whole feedback loop and then the body's ability to respond to that, which is different than doing a concentric muscle contraction.

So when we're doing a muscle test in applied kinesiology, it's really not about how strong the person is because both arms may be able to lift the same amount of weight, which is your concentric contraction, but the other arm may give away when you're doing this eccentric.

So an eccentric contraction is the muscle is already placed in a contracted state and then you're pressing down on the muscle to see if they can hold the contracted state about the muscle elongating.

That makes sense.

Yeah, so what would it actually look like?

...