Greg Roskopf
Greg Roskopf started his career in California as a Strength and Conditioning Coach at Fresno State University from 1985-1988. He also received his Masters Degree in Physical Education with an Emphasis in Exercise Science from Fresno State University. Although Greg left his role as a strength coach in 1988 to develop a business in personal training and sports performance, he continued to work with Fresno State’s medical staff, as a consultant until he was hired to work full time with the Denver Broncos in 1997.
While at Fresno State, working with performance athletes, Greg started questioning why some athletes would break down and get injured, while others could work through fatigue and achieve optimal levels of performance. He knew there had to be a fundamental explanation.
Greg began to focus on the biomechanics of the body and how the muscular system handles the demands that come with sports and/or training. He recognized that each athlete has his/her own specific limitations in muscle function that, if severe enough, could make certain athletes predisposed to injury. This is when he began to focus on the specific muscular attributes that are consistent with injured athletes. In order to do this, he recognized that he had to individually evaluate each athlete’s muscular capabilities. It was these individual assessments that shed so much light on why conventional exercise programs were actually contributing to many of the problems that athletes complained of. Greg realized that most documented training programs, whether prescribed for performance enhancement or rehabilitation, could not be universally applied to any group of clients. The clients with the most significant muscular imbalances were most likely to respond negatively to the protocol based programs. He observed that if muscular imbalances existed, the exercise programs designed for these athletes would reinforce their compensation patterns, making the strong muscles stronger while the weak muscles remained weak, thereby, magnifying their imbalances. This led Greg to believe that depending on the physical capabilities of a client, exercise based training programs may actually be contributing to their injuries, rather than preventing them. He theorized that by ignoring the individual mechanics of each person’s body, practitioners might be inhibiting the injured tissue from properly mending.
Through the process of continually looking at the “cause and effect” of the muscular system and how it relates to pain, Greg has attained his position as a specialist in the improvement of muscle function. He has developed a program which fills that gap between the medical and exercise fields. This program is Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT). MAT is a systematic process designed to evaluate and correct the muscle imbalances that contribute to chronic pain, injury and altered performance levels. It is bio-mechanically based process designed to positively impact anyone affected with muscle weakness and its associated pain.
Over the years, Greg has worked with clients of various levels of physical capabilities. Greg has also worked as a consultant for various professional sports teams including: the Denver Broncos, the Utah Jazz, and the Denver Nuggets. Due to the impact of the MAT principles in both the exercise and rehabilitation fields, MAT practices are gaining recognition throughout all facets of sports and recreation.
(Information provided by www.muscleactivation.com)