Often when we tell our friends, family or colleagues that we’re going for a massage, the most common response is “ahhhhh, nice!” but for those of you who have experienced therapeutic massage, you will know very well that it is not always, if ever, a pleasant experience.
There are many different types of massage, but therapeutic massage aims to release and rid the body of pain as much as possible. Techniques such as deep connective tissue release, sports therapeutic massage and soft tissue release, such as trigger point therapy, can often be quite painful and an unpleasant experience, but can help the body in so many ways.
Over time and years of build-up due to incorrect posture, stress, injury and structural or mechanical problems, our bodies start to develop an undesirable state of being. From the moment we start to walk we injure ourselves and create imperfect mechanical habits that may only affect the body later in life; children are resilient and bounce back quickly and so often we see them fall or twist their ankles and just as quickly as they fell they spring up and carry on swinging on the monkey bars without blinking. Whereas, if an adult twists their ankle, there is often a deep facial expression that could set a few wrinkles for life. Although as children we don’t ever really remember injuring ourselves or feeling dreadful aches and pains, the micro damage to our soft tissue and surrounding structures has already begun as well as the involuntary mechanical changes that create imbalances throughout the body, and the longer we continue with these imbalances, the more we start to feel the effects.
Therapeutic massage is there to help break down and release tension that has accumulated in the soft tissue over the years, whether it is from overuse injuries in sport, progressive stiffness from sitting at a desk for hours at a time or general stress, it aims to identify trigger points and tension and bring about increased blood flow to these areas so that they may begin to release and heal. Therapeutic massage is a constant progression, no one session will take all your aches and pains or stress away, the longer we have built up these triggers, the longer it takes to release because the body is so used to this state of being and recognizes it as the norm that it will start to revert back to its original undesirable state, but with every massage session the physiology of the soft tissue and surrounding structures begins to change and receive a new state of being. For some it can be unbearably painful, but there is good news… every session gets a little bit easier to handle.
One of the problems adding to the build-up of tension is that we as human beings, for some unfathomable reason, teach ourselves to ignore pain, and yes sometimes the pain does go away over a few days or we mask it with anti-inflammatories and analgesics, but the underlying problem hasn’t been addressed and so these problems reoccur and will eventually lead to a chronic injury.
So do yourself and your body a favour – listen, interpret and respond, don’t wait to get treatment or avoid treatment because you know it may be a painful experience, give your body the attention and love it deserves so that you may live to be a hundred years old and still be tap dancing in the rain!
