What Are The Sports Massage Benefits For Athletes?

Getting injured is the worst fear of every athlete. Injuries impair performance, delay training and conditioning schedules during recovery are costly to treat and, most of all, hurt. Dealing with pain and limited mobility after injury is exhausting, frustrating and worth the measures needed to prevent injury from occurring.

An athlete who has a regular sports massage tends to be more flexible and active. Here are the seven benefits of sports massage for athletes:

1. Reduces Pain and Inflammation

Many athletes suffer from mild to chronic pain. When an athlete is in pain, he or she may have an adverse effect on his or her performance. This is because the pain is in the way of the functionality of his or her body.

The study showed that the use of massage promotes the production of mitochondria. Mitochondria is an energy cell that helps repair muscles and suppress pain. This reduces pain, discomfort and inflammation.

2. Improves Sleep

Sports massage helps reduce tension, stimulate relaxation, and improve the quality of sleep for athletes. Getting enough and proper sleep is incredibly important for athletes because it promotes faster recovery time for injuries. This also helps to improve performance.

3. Provides Optimum Relaxation

Sports massage helps the muscle system improve its functionality before, during and after a game or a physical activity. The therapeutic massage system helps stimulate and tone your body and mind. This ensures optimum relaxation while creating a feeling of wholeness physically, mentally and emotionally.

4. Clears Lactic Acid from Muscles

When you work hard, your bodies will struggle to get oxygen to your busy muscles quickly. Breathing hard is the body’s response to the muscles’ need for more oxygen. Generally, the body prefers to produce its energy aerobically, i.e. through oxygen. If this cannot be done effectively, a process that produces lactic acid will begin. A by-product of this process is the burning sensation that we can often feel when we’ve been particularly strenuous. It’s this feeling that stops us from working further and forces us into recovery mode.

In Sports Massage: A Comprehensive Review, it is argued that massage can “facilitate the removal of lactate from tissue” because massage increases the flow of lymphatic fluid—a system that removes waste from cells back into the bloodstream. This may mean faster recovery after strenuous exercise. Regular sports massage can help you keep your training schedule on track so that you can hit those targets.

5. Enhances Performance

One of the key things that drives athletes is ambition: to run their distance faster than ever before, to throw or jump further, to lift heavier weights, or to overcome the opposition more thoroughly. This means that athletes are constantly on the lookout for tweaks that they can make to their training or competition preparation to give them the edge.

These adjustments need to be ethical and, of course, within the framework of the rules of their sport. It seems that massage can be an effective, legitimate way to get this edge. Research from the North American Journal of Physical Therapy suggests that massages, such as grip strength and vertical jumps for basketball players, can improve many of the athlete’s performance.

6. Increases Mobility and Flexibility

Getting a sports massage one or two days before a game or competition promotes mobility and flexibility by increasing the flow of blood to the muscle tissues and fascia. Increased mobility and flexibility can also improve the performance of athletes.