How Can Sports Massage Help You?

Massage is recorded as one of the earliest forms of physical therapy. It has many benefits, both physical and psychological and works on many levels. It is the unique way in which it combines the various benefits to suit the individual that makes it such a versatile and effective treatment. Massage helps many people with musculoskeletal problems that first sought help from other specialists and saw no improvement. This shows that massage is often the best treatment method.

The most common musculoskeletal problems are from minor injuries. These can be extremely painful and may seriously affect a persons occupation, sport or quality of life. If not diagnosed and treated properly at the early stage, a minor injury can sometimes lead to a more serious condition in the long term. Massage can treat the majority of such minor problems quickly and effectively. Injury prevention is another area where the importance of massage should not be underestimated. Bio-mechanic assessment and exercise are often prescribed for injury prevention but massage is the only actual treatment that can be applied specifically to help prevent injury. This is not only applied in sports context but also in terms of posture and other forms of stress.

Massage should also play a very important part in any athletes training program alongside warming up and cooling down. Through massage the build up of general aches and pains can be removed which most sports persons normally seem to accept. The therapist can use their hands to explore the tissues, find these problems and deal with them accordingly. This will not only help to improve performance and endurance but also prevent injuries and loss of joint mobility in potential trouble spots.

After the initial inflammatory stage, sports massage therapy is a superb form of treatment simply because it works with the body's own healing processes. Improving circulation and manipulation of the injured tissues will result in preventing adhesions forming, realigning scar tissue and much faster return to activity.