Your muscles are never truly "off." Even when you're dead relaxed, they hold a baseline of electrical activity called resting tone. That's normal. It's what keeps your joints stable and lets you move fast when you need to.

Your nervous system keeps that tone in balance with a constant push-and-pull of excitatory and inhibitory signals. The upper motor neurons in your brain send inhibitory signals down the spinal cord — the brakes — keeping the lower motor neurons from firing too hard.

Then neurological disease damages those upper motor neurons. The brakes are gone. The lower motor neurons, with nothing holding them back, go haywire. Muscles fire when they shouldn't. They fight you when they should relax. They drag joints into positions they were never meant to hold.

That's spasticity — and it shows up in most people with upper motor neuron conditions: MS, ataxia, stroke, TBI, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, and more. If you've got a neuro diagnosis, this is your fight too.

Spasticity isn't one thing. Here's how it tends to show up:

It fights harder the faster you move. Try to move a spastic limb slowly and gently, and you might get away with it. Move it fast, and it slams the brakes. That speed-dependent resistance is the signature of spasticity.

Clonus. Rhythmic, involuntary jerking set off by a quick stretch. You feel it most at the ankle: a fast upward flex of the foot triggers a run of rapid downward jerks.

Spasms. Sudden, involuntary contractions of whole muscle groups. The leg shoots straight out. A touch, a temperature change, or even a full bladder can set them off — and they can hit hard enough to throw someone out of a wheelchair.

Jacked-up reflexes. The knee-jerk reflex, cranked by spasticity, goes wildly overactive.

Abnormal posturing. Chronic spasticity drags joints into predictable positions — bent elbow, bent wrist, curling fingers in the arm; hips pulling together, locked knee, and a foot turning in and down in the leg.

Leave it alone and it snowballs:

Contracture. Hold a joint short long enough and the muscle and soft tissue physically shorten. That's a contracture. It's painful, it kills your range of motion, and if you ignore it long enough, it becomes permanent. Here's the part that should make you angry: it's largely preventable.

Pain. Spastic muscles never clock out. They fatigue, they ache, and they cause real, grinding chronic pain — especially at night.

Lost function. Spasticity in the hand turns writing, buttoning, and eating into a battle. Spasticity in the leg wrecks your gait and raises your fall risk.

Wrecked sleep. Nighttime spasms are a leading reason people with neuro conditions can't sleep — and bad sleep undermines every single thing you're trying to fix in your nervous system.

Stretching. Regular, sustained stretching of spastic muscles is the foundation. It won't fix the neurological cause, but it keeps muscle length, prevents contracture, and drops your tone for a while. Daily is the floor. Twice daily for the badly affected muscles. Non-negotiable.

Positioning. How you hold your body at rest and in bed changes your spasticity. Put spastic muscles in a lengthened position and you lower the trigger for spasm and protect your range of motion.

Movement. Appropriate exercise reduces spasticity over time. Regular movement keeps muscle length, drives circulation, and — through neuroplasticity — actually dials down the hyperexcitability in those spinal circuits. Read the word appropriate twice. Overdo it and you'll spike your spasticity instead.

Temperature. Heat cranks spasticity up in most people. Cold brings it down. Cold packs, cool water, air conditioning — all of it can buy you temporary relief and make movement easier.

Oral meds. Baclofen, tizanidine, and diazepam are the usual oral options. They work — but the side effects are real: sedation, weakness, a foggy brain. The higher the dose, the more they cost you. A drug can quiet a muscle and still steal your sharpness, your energy, your ability to function today. Somebody has to weigh that trade honestly. Usually nobody does.

Intrathecal baclofen. When spasticity is severe and oral meds can't touch it, a pump can be implanted to send baclofen straight into your spinal fluid. Much higher concentration where you need it, far lower dose in your system, fewer side effects. For the right person, it's life-changing.

Botox. Injected right into a spastic muscle, botulinum toxin blocks the nerve-muscle junction and quiets that muscle for 3 to 6 months. Strong medicine for focal spasticity. But it only pays off if you pair it with rehab. The shot buys you a window; the work is what makes it count.

Managing spasticity isn't about killing tone. It's about winning back function.

Sometimes a little spasticity is doing you a favor — giving a weak limb enough stiffness to bear weight. Wipe it out and you might be worse off. The goal was never zero spasticity. The goal is spasticity that doesn't stop you from living.

That takes individual assessment. What's right for one person's spasticity pattern is dead wrong for another's. At LWA, we don't hand spasticity off to a neurologist and forget it. We treat it as part of the whole program, managed against your real life — not filed away as somebody else's problem. Because spasticity you ignore will quietly undermine everything else you're grinding for.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That's the LWA way.

Spasticity limiting your progress? Book your free 30-minute consultation and let's build a management strategy that actually works.