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Recovery
If you love sports or simply thrive on living an active, adventurous lifestyle, you work your body hard, sometimes pushing the limits of endurance. And while the thrill of competition or the satisfaction of achieving your personal best can be exhilarating, your body knows when it’s time for rest and recovery. To stay at the top of your game in any physically demanding activity, it’s important not only to rest, but also to keep your body limber, relieve post-workout muscle soreness, and speed recovery from the stresses, strains and repeated traumas your muscles endure as they face greater-than-average activity.
The Right Treatment for Enhanced Performance
Even to maintain your current level of physical activity long-term, you must provide your body with the rest and rejuvenation it needs to recover. Yet, no doubt one of your major goals is to continuously improve your athletic performance. The desire to gradually increase speed, maximize power or precision, or build stamina makes it even more critical to give your muscles the kind of treatment they need to be fully restored after each workout.
Sports Massage can make a difference
Sports massage provides the firm yet soothing touch your tired, tense, and overtaxed muscles need to relax and recover. It can also help promote deep relaxation of your central nervous system, providing the optimal atmosphere for healing and restoration to take place.
Restore Balance, Promote Healing, Prevent Injury
The benefits of sports massage are so extensive that this natural form of therapy not only restores balance to the body, but it simultaneously enhances the athlete’s overall well-being. With a skilled massage therapist in your corner, the physical, mechanical, and even psychological elements of the treatment all combine to create deep relaxation. And this relaxation helps prepare the body for more restful sleep, clearing the way for the nighttime muscular repair that fortifies the muscles against future injury.By restoring balance, promoting healing, and preventing future injury, sports massage can play an invaluable role in any athlete’s post-workout performance-enhancement regimen.
5 Underlying Goals of Sports Massage
Sports massage targets specific physiological and mechanical functions to help you get to the heart of the problem, rather than simply treating the symptom. Here are five goals an experienced sports massage therapist can accomplish for you:
1. Eliminate cellular waste products that accumulate during muscular exertion. Lactic and uric acids are natural by-products of exercise that build up as you push your muscles to perform when you work out or compete. This buildup leads to muscle soreness. By speeding the removal of these substances from muscle tissue, sports massage reduces muscle soreness and speeds recovery. By moderating your activity level, you may be able to do your part to help prevent some soreness before it starts.
2. Increase lymphatic flow, making cellular waste removal more efficient. As lactic and uric acid—along with bacteria, toxins and other harmful waste products—are broken down and carried away from muscles and other body tissues, the body is free to begin the healing and rebuilding process. You can also help this process by eating a healthy diet to keep your immune system working as it should.
3. Enhance blood flow to carry more life-giving oxygen and nutrients to muscles for faster healing and rebuilding. As waste products are carried away through the lymphatic system for breakdown and disposal, a new surge of oxygen-rich blood flows in, providing the nutrients that the muscles, bones, joints and connective tissue need for optimal health, recovery and performance. Sports massage can improve circulation so the healthy foods you’re eating can nourish your tissues and help you excel.
4. Reduce inflammation caused by traumatic overuse of muscles and joints, speeding healing. As long as any inflammation remains, full recovery will be stalled, future performance compromised and cumulative injury more likely to occur. A skilled massage therapist knows which techniques work best to keep inflammation at bay and can tell you what you can do to aid the process.
5. Improve range of motion by reducing joint and muscle stiffness, and increase flexibility by minimizing scar tissue buildup. By using the appropriate muscle manipulation technique, your sports massage therapist can help you restore full function more quickly, while advising you on the best ways to maximize flexibility.
As your sports massage therapist works to relax muscle tension and ease any existing muscle cramps and spasms, he or she will also be working to accomplish each of the five results described above.
The human body was designed to walk, run or stop; it wasn’t built for coasting. Cullen Hightower.