PMR - Progressive Muscle Relax [iPhone]

Your doctor or health professional may have introduced you to progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) as part of a therapy. Our app helps you to go through PMR sessions by yourself.

Our PMR app guides you through a complete PMR session. It enables you to focus solely on your tension and relaxation. It tells you, by voice and in writing, what you need to do at what time within each exercise. Our three-dimensional model shows you how to tense and relax which muscles. The app leads you through a complete program and frees you from counting exercises, their timing and their sequence.

Choose your own rhythm by selecting the duration of the tension and relaxation phases yourself, as well as the number of iterations for each exercise. This allows you to vary between a 3-minute short session and a long relaxation program lasting a quarter or half an hour.

Our app offers you a selection of pleasant voices to guide you through your PMR session. You can adapt the pace and the pitch of voices, or load further voices through the Settings app. We explain exercises in detail to beginners, using speech and visual demonstrations. Advanced users may reduce the announcements to a minimum. You may play music during your session if that sooths you.

We aim at making our PMR app accessible to the visually impaired through voice over. If you are affected and use voice over, please let us know how this works for you and how we can further improve in this direction.

Progressive muscle relaxation (also progressive relaxation (PMR) or deep muscle relaxation) developed by Edmund Jacobson is a relaxation technique that involves learning to monitor the tension in specific muscle groups by first tensing each muscle group. This tension is then released, as attention is directed towards the differences felt during tension and relaxation. The individual muscle parts are tensed in a certain order. The concentration of the person is directed to the alternation between tension and relaxation and to the sensations associated with these different states. The aim of the procedure is to lower the muscle tension below the normal level due to improved body awareness. Over time, the person should learn to induce muscular relaxation whenever they want to. Relaxing the muscles can reduce signs of physical restlessness or excitement, such as palpitations, sweating or tremors. In addition, muscle tension can be traced and loosened, thus reducing pain.

PMR is often used in behavioral therapy, such as the treatment of anxiety disorders, where it is used as part of a systematic desensitization treatment. Good results can also be achieved for high blood pressure, headaches, migraines, chronic back pain, sleep disorders, and stress.

The first few sessions are free of cost. Later on, we will ask you for a contribution in the form of a subscription. If you cannot yet decide to subscribe at that point, we will finance further cost-free sessions with advertisements. We recommend a subscription, though, as ads may disturb your concentration. Subscriptions are not renewed automatically, but you may start a new subscription at any time. If you opt for a subscription, we do not collect any data from you, and the purchasing data is only handled by the Apple App Store. If you opt for ads, ad providers may collect certain data from you through Google Ads, as described in Google's privacy policy.

Excerpts of this text originate from Wikipedia.