Year: 2018

Have you ever felt a hard, tender spot in your muscle that just seemed to not want to go away? This ‘knot’ may even seem like the cause of all your neck or back pain and even with your consistent stretching it doesn’t seem to let you do your work in peace. Massage therapy is commonly used to relieve muscle tension, pain, and to release those persistent knots that are found in tight muscles. Some of these ‘knots’ are known to RMTs as ‘Trigger Points’.

Trigger points are hyper-irritable spots that are usually found in the muscle belly which can often send pain to a different location. They shorten the muscle it is affecting and can cause a decrease in muscle strength and may radiate pain down an arm or up into your head, causing headaches. Most of the time, these ‘knots’ have a specific pain pattern that can make them easy to locate and treat. As a Massage Therapist, treating trigger points can be very affective to relieving muscle pain along with the referral pain and lengthening the muscle so that full strength will return.

If you are feeling ‘knotted up’, book an appointment today to get your muscles worked on!

Growing up, you have most likely learnt that warming up and stretching are two good ways to prevent injuries to muscles during exercise. You may have included these factors in or before your regular workouts and swear by both of them as they may have helped prevent injuries. Or you may have tried doing both before activity and still have gotten muscle injuries. Although warming up and stretching is a great start before activity, it isn’t the only factors that can contribute to injury prevention.

Conditioning your muscles prior to exercise has a huge benefit to sports. Conditioning strengthens muscles that are specifically used in certain activities. This might seem boring at the time, but when it comes to performing well during competition or preventing injuries, they are of vital importance.

In taking the example of marathon training, the muscles that are used in long distance running are generally the leg muscles and hip muscles. Hip flexors tend to be tight and overworked along with the outer quadriceps muscle and IT (iliotibial) bands. So how can conditioning help? The most common injuries in runners happen to be knee injuries. To prevent knee issues, strengthening the surrounding muscles is crucial. Instead of only focusing on running, going to the gym or doing home body weight exercises specifically to improve your condition for your sport are important in training. Outer hips muscles are generally weak and need to be strengthened to improve a runner’s form. These can be worked on by performing balancing exercises with a simple bosu ball or through the practice of yoga. The inner quad muscle also tends to be weak and needs strengthening exercises to help balance the knee cap as the outer quad and ITB are tight. These overworked muscles can be worked on through stretching, foam rolling, and massage therapy along with other therapy. By conditioning the proper muscles, athletes are able to perform better and to stay longer in the sport.

Book a massage today to help with muscle conditioning and injury prevention!