Meridians and muscles

What is the overall intent of your question? I ask because it could be answered in many ways.

One way would be to simply not think of those relationships like that because they are, arguably, not that clinically valid. But how clinically invalid would depend greatly on what techniques you are intending to use to work with a person.

Another potential answer would be yes, there are layers of tissues potentially influenced by multiple channels - but again besides just where the meridians travel, that may not be clinically useful, or minimally so, in the application of techniques to resolve problems in that area.

I would suggest you learn more about sinew channels. Our site doesn’t have too much information on these, but all of the major textbooks do. I would suggest looking through the relevant chapters in either:

• 
  or
• (my personal favorite)
  or from the Japanese perspective

If it for that reason you would really enjoy exploring more of the sinew channels as I indicated above, the hara diagnosis book will be particularly interesting to you (even though alot of it is far more relevant to acupuncturists).

What you would learn from that is that the meridians are not a “dead” line running through parts of the body - there is a whole lot more happening there and the points are conduits to at times fairly wide swathes of the body tissue/organs, etc.

The limited viewpoint of a meridian that is given by the acupuncture charts does a real disservice to the range of what is actually happening there. Acupuncturists, of course, will understand most of this, but people with limited training who only see point diagrams will only be tiptoeing on the surface.