01/15/2026
Many of you have been asking me about this. My dissertation has now been published.
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a research project that grew out of a simple clinical question:
If muscle-targeting interventions improve chronic pain by correcting muscle instability, how do we validate the instability, confirm its correction, and measure it objectively?
I kept seeing the same pattern in the clinic: people weren’t weak in the traditional sense, and they didn’t necessarily have significant structural damage outside of the typical bulged discs and degeneration. What they did have was poor proprioceptive tonus — the ability for muscles to maintain low-level, position-specific tension that keeps the body stable. Tonus is the muscle’s capability to respond to an external load or stress on command and control it within the necessary range of motion. Surprisingly, this isn’t something that gets much attention in mainstream rehabilitation or performance literature, but there is a substantial amount of information in research literature.
My dissertation explored research on this subject from 1992 to 2025. I set out to test whether restoring proprioceptive input and then reinforcing it with low-load, isolated (targeted muscle positions) isometric exercise can improve lumbopelvic muscle tonus in individuals with non-specific chronic low back pain, and whether or not this would have a significant impact on their pain. I have seen consistent positive outcomes in doing so over the past 15 years, but it has never been studied. The study ran for 12 sessions within 6 weeks across multiple time points and tracked changes in muscle tonus (responsiveness), function, and pain.
It is the first study to introduce an objective measure of muscle instability by measuring tonus with a handheld dynamometer within individual muscle-biased positions. It is also the first study to tie weak tonus to chronic pain, while demonstrating that increasing tonus decreases pain and increases function.
The study demonstrated substantial improvement in pain, with substantial improvement in function, while muscle tonus increased between 100–300%, even with herniated discs and severe degeneration present.
For those interested in the science behind neuromuscular stability, chronic low back pain, or direct muscle proprioceptive training, the full dissertation was officially published in the Liberty University library this week. I’m grateful to everyone who helped make this possible and to the participants who trusted the process.
If you’d like to read it or reference it, here’s the link:
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/7844/
I’m looking forward to continuing this work and building on the clinical side of it as well.
For more information on the subject, call 715-781-9741
Dr. Jeff Tardiff PhD, MS
Nonspecific chronic low back pain affects most people through-out the world at some point within their lives, negatively impacting 80%-90% of the overall population, their families, and their communities. Thus far, the outcome of most studies indicate that the best form of treatment for this specifi...
