When To Get A Sports Massage

If you have ever had a Swedish massage or experienced pampering treatments at a spa, you will undoubtedly know that these types of messages can offer a very relaxing and pleasurable experience. A sports massage, though, is a whole different ball game.

 

A sports massage goes a lot deeper than your traditional relaxation massage, and can certainly be fairly uncomfortable or even outright painful, as the therapist works to get all the aches, pains, twinges and adhesions out of your muscles. But in the end, that pain is worth it, as sports massages have a host of benefits.

The main benefit of a sports massage is that it reduces muscle tension, much like a Swedish massage does though. While your Swedish massage might be suitable for the average non exercising office worker, if you’re training hard and pushing your body to its limits at the gym on a near daily basis, this simply won’t be enough for you. After a tough training session, you’ll nearly always be sore, and this soreness is caused in large part by a tightness in the muscles. While tight muscles aren’t an issue in themselves, they can lead to complications down the line if they’re not addressed.

 

Think of your muscles like an elastic band – the tighter they are, the more prone they are to snapping. Excessively tight muscles, when left untreated over a longer period of time, are far more likely to suffer tweaks and twinges, even if you don’t experience a full rupture or tear.

You might think that you can stretch to reduce muscle tightness, but this often simply isn’t enough. The effects of stretching are fairly short term, meaning that within a few hours, your muscles could have seized up again. Stretching doesn’t get deep enough either. A skilled sports massage therapist can get deep into the muscle tissue, and not only relieve tightness, but also break up trigger points and adhesions. These are knots in the tissue that cause tightness, and that no amount of stretching will remedy.

A further benefit of sports massage is its effect on the circulatory and lymphatic systems.

Your circulatory system pushes blood around the body, and having a sports massage stimulates your body's natural action to get the blood flowing faster. Blood contains essential components for post workout recovery – oxygen, nutrients, and red and white blood cells. By getting more of these essential nutrients to the muscle tissue more quickly, damaged fibers can be repaired quicker, and your soreness will go away much sooner.

The lymphatic system pushes a fluid called lymph around the body. When this system becomes congested or slows down, it can lead to swelling around the joints known as edema (or, in plain English, excessive fluid buildup). Just like with the circulatory system, massage speeds up the functioning of the lymph system, and reduces swelling and inflammation.

Linked in with reducing tension, massage can improve your flexibility and mobility too. This is absolutely vital for avoiding injuries and improving your athletic performance. Many athletes find that they need a certain degree of flexibility to perform particular movements in their sport, and even regular gym goers can find that restricted mobility can stop them from performing various exercises. Sports massage is better than stretching for this set of very convincing reasons:

- Go back to the muscle/ elastic band analogy. If you stretch an elastic band over and over again, it does become more stretchy, but it also gets significantly weaker, making it more likely to snap. Massage though, increases flexibility without decreasing strength, by breaking down knots, rather than stressing and pulling the fibers.

- Massage is clearly extremely beneficial, whether you’re an elite athlete, a hardcore gym trainee, or just looking to maintain your general health and fitness. But when should you get a sports massage, and what should you be looking for when you decide to go ahead?