Muscle synergies in clinical practice: Theoretical and practical implications

Understanding how the CNS copes with the redundancy of the musculoskeletal system is a central aim in motor neuroscience and has important implications in the clinical scenario. A long-standing idea hypothesis is that motor control may be simplified by a modular organization, in which several a few muscle synergies are used to organize muscles in functional groups. In this chapter, we present the theory hypothesis of muscle synergies under from a simplified point of view and we describe its practical implications in the context of neurological pathologies. This chapter wants to be an intuitive and practical guide to those practitioners, new to the concept of muscle synergies, willing to understand how to perform such an analysis in typical clinical settings.