Caring for your body is probably the best form of preventative medicine. With proper diet and exercise, your body will be enhanced and your mind will be cleared of any daily challenges you may encounter. In turn, you will become more resilient to disease and depression.
An important part of your exercise routine is to challenge your body. But after a challenging and productive routine, sports enthusiasts usually experience soreness that might be localized to a certain body part.
Exercise is important, but so is recovery. For your body to continue to perform optimally for your next fitness session, it needs ample time to recover. Some of the things you can do to fully recover from training include stretching, getting good quality sleep, ice baths, modifying your workout schedule, and sports massage.
Sports massage will alleviate pain caused by too much physical activity. This was primarily developed to serve athletes as an excellent way of preventing and relieving injuries. But today, both athletes and non-athletes can enjoy psychological and physiological benefits from a sports massage therapy.
7 Health Benefits of Sports Massage
1. Relieves Stress
Aside from deep tissue massage, sports massage will also help you manage stress properly. If you receive a sports massage, your body will release endorphins, a neurotransmitter that acts as the natural pain reliever of your body. Endorphins that are released after sports massage therapy will help decrease your anxiety, improve your mood, provide pain relief, and improve your overall health and well-being.
2. Faster Exercise Recovery
Are you familiar with delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS syndrome? This is caused by the eccentric part of an exercise. It happens after you have done unfamiliar or new exercise routines for the very first time.
If you are committed to working out multiple days in a week, suffering from DOMS can be debilitating. Good thing sports massage can help reduce muscle soreness and swelling.
3. Boosts Training Volume and Capacity
Since sports massage can decrease swelling and pain, you will be able to train more often and push yourself more. Massage will hammer out the tightness caused by regular repetitive exercise, which can then improve your ability to perform at full capacity.
4. Helps Eliminate Toxins and Waste Products
Your body will get more oxygen-carrying blood vessels to your extremities and muscles if adhesions in the muscle tissue are broken down. This will allow for enhanced blood and nutrient flow for your body to eliminate toxins and other waste products, which may hinder recovery, performance, and muscular function.
5. Increases Circulation
This is another great benefit of sports massage. The increase in cardiovascular and muscular circulation won’t just remove toxins from your body but will also improve performance and fast-track recovery time.
6. Improves Mobility And Flexibility
If you are exercising regularly, your body will continuously go through the process of muscular catabolism, which is the breaking down of muscle tissue. Muscular anabolism follows, wherein the muscular tissues are rebuilt to make them stronger and more energy-efficient. These processes can cause the build-up of adhesions and scars, which can then limit your range of motion and flexibility. With sports massage, these scar tissues and adhesions can be broken down to increase joint mobility and muscle flexibility.
7. Prevents Injury
Injuries occur when a joint or muscle is overused, a muscle is cold before exercising, or a movement was incorrectly performed. Muscular activation will escalate during exercise with the increased blood and oxygen flow to your muscles. In turn, this can help prevent injury.
The Importance of Sports Massage Before and After Athletic Events
Athletes must receive sports massage therapy before and after an athletic event, with plenty of maintenance sessions in between competitions.
Pre-event sports massage won’t just improve tissue pliability but will also warm up the major muscles that will be used. Also, this will help get you in a good mental state for the competition and prepare you to reach your athletic performance potential.
Post-event sports massage, on the other hand, focuses on recovery. It is geared toward minimizing muscle spasms and metabolic build-up that usually happens after vigorous exercises.
By integrating sports and remedial massage therapy in a weekly training program, the occurrence of DOMS will be prevented and athletes will feel more focused and calmer before and after meets.
AUTHOR BIO
Marc Innes is the Owner and Principal of the School of Natural Therapies, a training school for Massage & Holistic Therapies located in London. Marc began his career in the NHS, working in a number of managerial and training roles within the Ambulance Service in London. Marc spent much of that time educating and coaching medical staff. Over time he developed an interest in all things complementary to Allopathic Medicine, in particular, Reiki Healing, which along with EFT, which culminated in Marc running a successful teaching and ‘energy healing’ practice. Marc is passionate about the massage and complementary therapy industry.
