What Is A Sports Massage?

Sports massage is a form of massage technique which focuses on the treatment of soft tissue aches, pain and injuries associated with recreational activities. Massage can reduce muscle stiffness and reduce heart rate and blood pressure to increase relaxation.

Sports massage has been an important part of the modern athletic program, from sports medicine clinics, to college training rooms, to professional locker rooms and Olympic training. Increasing numbers of trainers agree that massage can give the athletes who compete in high performance sports an extra edge. Massage has become an ingredient essential to complete a workout. More and more people are realizing that not only exercise itself requires a full workout routine, but also caring for the wear-and-tear and minor injuries that naturally occur with strenuous activity. Massage’s physiological and psychological advantages make it an ideal supplement to a complete conditioning programme.

A massage will help someone who regularly extends their physical limits by exercise such as running , cycling, hiking, swimming , dancing, tennis and other racquet sports, strength training and aerobics. Others do strenuous tasks in a day that is usually not graded as exercise. Examples are mothers with small children, gardeners and those who strenuously use their bodies at work.

Benefits from Sports Massage

• It lets you get quicker into good shape, and with less rigidity and soreness. 
• It helps you recover from hard workouts quicker, and alleviates symptoms that can cause injury.
• Enjoying less muscle stiffness and increasing relaxation and health is justification enough for most athletes to enjoy daily massage. But as research on the actual physical benefits of massage continues to expand, more and more athletes will be taking advantage of this ‘feel-good’ training process.
• It lets you get quicker into good shape, and with less rigidity and soreness. 
• It helps you recover from hard workouts quicker, and alleviates symptoms that can cause injury.

How Does Sports Massage Help the Body?

Therapeutic massage helps the body recover from the pressures of training, and supports the healing process of recovery. The physiological effects of massage include increased circulation of blood and lymph, relaxation of the muscles and general relaxation. These, in turn, result in the removal of waste products and improved cell quality, normalization and increased tissue elasticity, deactivation of trigger points and faster healing of injuries. All this adds up to relief from soreness and rigidity, improved flexibility and less potential for future injury. 

Massage can also concentrate on particular muscles used in a sport or fitness practice, in addition to general recovery. For example, areas of greater stress for runners and dancers are in the thighs, in the upper body for swimmers and in the arms for tennis players. These areas tend to be tighter, lose versatility and grow trigger points.