Muscle fatigue/failure, joint stress, tendonitis, and inflammation are part and parcel of a sports career. No athlete can go through an athletic practice without following a rigorous running schedule that requires a lot more wear and tear than normal.
Athletes can’t afford to let these injuries impede their path to excellence but pain can be a deterrent. This is why before injuries aggravate into a major issue, it’s important to rehabilitate their physical wellbeing. Massages are an excellent way to promote healing and alleviate pain.
Here’s how a massage can help prepare your muscle tissue for a new challenge.
Flexibility and Injury Prevention
Your muscle fibers need stretching to promote flexibility and massages do just that. Athletes can enhance their range of motion and muscle flexibility. This is an essential quality of any good athlete because stiffness while playing can affect their performance while sprinting, throwing or leaping.
Massage also stimulates reflexes within the muscle to better tone them. This is also important for increasing the range of motion because inactivity or improper muscle movement can lead to the knotting of fibers. Transverse massaging motion helps prevent such adhesions or knots, which could potentially prevent the muscle from functioning optimally.
Reduced Pain and Fatigue
When we talk about fatigue in the case of an athlete, it’s not the same as feeling tired after a long day of doing domestic chores. Muscle pain and fatigue occur due to overexertion. When you work your muscles really hard, toxins like lactic acid are automatically produced. If left to stay, these toxins can really damage the tissue, obstructing the blood circulation. With reduced blood flow, the tissue tends to shrink which leads to tightness and inflexibility.
Massaging with long strokes and pressuring certain points can stimulate blood flow in those areas and revitalize the damaged tissue. As a result, you’ll feel more rested with less muscle pain.
Removal of Toxins
The release of toxins during any strenuous physical activity is common among athletes. What massage helps do is promote recovery by removing the toxins. It alleviates lactic acid and other toxins that may have affected the muscle, restricting muscle movement. Through gentle strokes, the therapist will ease pressure into the deeper tissues and trigger dilation of the vessels. This enables fresh blood to supply to the tissue and toxins to be removed.
With better blood circulation, healing speeds up and you can soon be back on track.
If you want us to help you heal the best way, call us at 780-757-3452 right away. Our massage therapists can work their magic to revive your athletic abilities with deep tissue therapy and sports massage in Edmonton.
