Sports Massage - The Best Training Partner for Performance
Regardless of your sport, rest day and recovery is your best friend. Extremely hard for those who love their sport, but necessary all the same.
Having a massage on your rest day will enhance your day off and will be your secret weapon to improved performance when you go back to training.
Rest and deep relaxation
To give your body and mind one hour or even ninety minutes of deep relaxation during a sports massage can be the equivalent of several hours of sleep. Your nervous system switches to sympathetic mode, which means you’re not in fight or flight mode.
Fight or flight is when our adrenaline is pumping, our senses are heightened and all other systems are fired up. Which is necessary in short bursts but with heavy training, busy lifestyle and general modern life stressors. Our bodies can stay running in this mode for too long each day which will lead to burn out. In particular adrenal fatigue.
Circulation
Massage greatly increases blood flow to muscles. This is particularly beneficial to tight and fatigued muscles on rest day.
During your sports massage fresh blood flows into the soft tissues which helps repair the cells by delivering oxygen and taking with it metabolic waste to be processed by the lymphatic system. This process reduces pain, speeds up healing of micro-tears and helps eliminate excess fluid from the muscles. It also prevents injury by ensuring the muscle is supple with a good oxygen supply and good rate of healing.
Imagine running a marathon and not getting a quality sports massage post race?
Increase resting length of muscles
By simply massaging the muscles during a sports massage, we are lengthening the resting length of your muscles.
Over use and repetitive movements will shorten the muscles resting length. This can cause postural issues and over use injuries, particularly obvious in golfers for example. A golfer will always swing one way. Shortening the muscles in one side of the pelvic girdle. Or a tennis player who serves right handed.
Regular sports massage treatments can prevent these injuries by helping stretch out the muscles and help the body create balance in your supporting muscles. By lengthening a muscle’s resting length, strengthens the muscle.
Postural Balance
My main objective when working with a client is to help create balance as best as possible. For whatever the client’s main objective is, where ever the pain is presenting itself, I find that by looking at how the body’s musculoskeletal system is out of balance can be a short cut to the most effective treatment plan.
By working on maintaining the best possible postural balance will enhance physical performance, reduce chance of injury, even leaving the person less fatigued by the end of the day.
Want to know more?
If you want to get in touch with me to say hello or book an appointment just click on the Facebook Messenger icon you see at the bottom right of this page or call me on 0416119049 or email me at erin@byerinmassage.com
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