Whether you do exercise or not, you need a massage. Massage is pampering for your muscles. It helps to reduce muscle stiffness, pain, fatigue and increase flexibility. While it can stimulate the body and increase mental alertness, it can also reduce anxiety and promote feelings of well-being, which will enhance relaxation. Your muscles are like a piece of bubble-wrap. The bubbles are full of waste fluids and the spaces between the bubbles become congested and stick together like glue, which is caused by the stresses and strains of everyday life. Massage bursts the bubbles, helping the lymphatic system dispose of the waste fluids and at the same time ‘ironing-out’ the congestions, which cleanses and refreshes the muscles, allowing them to perform to their optimum.
If you suffer an injury to a muscle, whether sporting related or not, the muscle needs help to repair and massage aids the speed and quality of the repair. If the muscle is left to repair by itself, it will bind together in a sporadic way, which causes indiscriminate scar tissue and results in the muscle having significantly reduced performance, permanently. Conversely, if the injured muscle is subject to massage techniques, the tensile stress of the massage strokes gently coaxes the tissue fibres in one direction, which produces neatly aligned scar tissue and results in the muscle repairing to 80% of its original condition. Whilst massage is a must for all muscle injuries, by having regular massages, it can also be a preventative treatment.
I work on computers and at desks and benches a lot and this gives me block tension (so I’m told) and lots of knots between my shoulder blades. Conventional massages don’t even begin to sort it out even when repeated and it is gradually just getting worse and worse. Would a sports massage be what’s needed?