The purpose of the study is to examine whether certain neck strengthening exercises result in change in size of the neck muscles being targeted.

Musculoskeletal Ultrasound is a non invasive, safe tool that will be used to measure the size of certain muscles in your neck. This will allow us to determine if these muscles actually get bigger in response to targeted exercise. Muscle size is a factor associated with strength.

This study will help us tease out the time it takes to create neck muscle hypertrophy, or increase in muscle size, in order to develop effective protocols for neck strengthening which may be useful in the management of chronic neck pain.

Weakness in certain neck muscles may be associated with the development of neck pain and we hope to determine effective training protocols for these neck muscle groups.

The purpose of this study is to develop and test if upper limb task practice and muscle activity training improve upper limb function in stroke survivors. Participants will be asked to come to the laboratory 3 times a week for 6 weeks to receive upper limb task practice and/or muscle activity training. Participants will also come to the laboratory for additional 3 visits for assessments of upper extremity function. The total duration of the study will be 2.5 months.

Rehabilitation interventions including resistance training, functional and task-specific therapy, and gait or locomotor training have been shown to be successful in improving motor function in individuals with neurologic disease or injury. Recent investigations conducted in our laboratory indicate that intense resistance training coupled with task-specific functional training lead to significant gains in functional motor recovery. Similarly, gait rehabilitation involving intense treadmill training and/or task-specific locomotor training has been shown to be effective in improving locomotor ability. However, the underlying neural adaptations associated with these therapeutic approaches are not well understood. Our primary goal is to understand the motor control underpinnings of neurologic rehabilitation in order to apply this knowledge to future generations of therapeutic interventions.