Sports Massage
Swimming, biking, yoga, weight lifting, Zumba or spin class, running, or even a walk outside: medical experts all agree that regular exercise is an important element of staying healthy! Yet regardless of how you choose to stay fit—competing in local road races, joining an adult sports team, or hitting the gym a few times a week—maintaining a regular exercise routine can easily be undermined by physical fatigue, soreness and pain, and even injury.
In fact, staying healthy and fit often requires more than just exercise: proper nutrition, active recovery, injury avoidance, and rest are all equally important. And incorporating sports massage therapy, along with good eating and sleep habits, into your exercise routine can help as well. Sports massage is an excellent way to minimize pain and discomfort from DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness), relax and rejuvenate overworked muscles, increase flexibility and mobility, reduce recovery times between workouts, and even prevent injury.
Sports Massage: What Is It?
Sports massage is a type of massage therapy designed to facilitate relaxing and rehabilitating recovery in those muscles and soft tissues that have been stressed by an active, athletic lifestyle. Depending on the needs of each unique patient, sports massage usually involves a variety of massage techniques and concentrates on specific muscle groups. And don’t let the word “relaxing” confuse you: sports massage is not designed to for full-body relaxation like other massage techniques: when performed properly, a sports massage can get a bit uncomfortable as it works out tightness, inelasticity, and lack of flexibility in active muscle groups!
Just as each patient is unique, each sports massage is just as unique. Based on his/her assessment of your specific massage requirements, your licensed massage therapist will develop a customized massage plan designed to target exactly those muscle groups and areas of soft tissue damage that require it. Your specific sports massage therapy may involve techniques such as:
- Trigger point massage: involves repeatedly manipulating trigger points (or knots) within muscles with patterns of isolated pressure and release
- Myofascial release: involves relaxing and stretching the fascia, or the connective tissue around the bones, muscles, and tendons
- Muscle energy: actively contracting the largest muscular groupings can stretch, relax, and strengthen tight, inflexible muscles
- Soft tissue release: passive, active, and/or weight-bearing techniques can stretch out and relax stiffness and tightness in the tendons, fascia, and muscle
Sports Massage: Benefits
In general terms, the biggest benefit of sports massage is enhanced athletic performance. More specifically, sports massage offers a number of benefits that, when taken together, add up to help you maintain your exercise routine and recover faster between workouts. Sports massage can:
- Help relieve muscle tension, discomfort, and pain
- Promote faster post-workout recovery time to decrease time between workouts
- Improve healing for existing injuries and prevent common overuse injuries
- Improve muscle elasticity flexibility, elasticity, and range of motion
- Improve blood flow for increased muscle growth and endurance performance
- Reduce blood pressure and heart rate
And the benefits of sports massage aren’t just physical! Studies have shown that sports massage can have added psychological benefits, including lowered anxiety, improved outlook and mood, and better quality of sleep. So to support your physical fitness, your mental health, and your health and overall well-being, schedule your sports massage today!
For more information about how acupuncture, massage therapy and other treatments can help you, please contact the Urban Acupuncture Center Board Certified Licensed Acupuncturist’s team at Indianola Ave, Clintonville (614) 725-2488 | Main St, Westerville (614) 426-4406 or click here. Taking new patients in and around greater Columbus, Ohio.