Choosing a Type of Massage

Ramona Westerberg
The Healing Place of Cottage Grove
www.thehealingplacecg.com


There are many types of massage and sometimes massage techniques become fashionable. Though some consumers may know a specific massage modality or technique they want, it is generally best to ask your massage therapist what massage modality will give you the results you want. Most massage therapists use a variety of massage modalities or types in a massage session to best achieve desired results.

The four most common types of massage are:

Swedish: The most common type of massage, to relax and energize you.
Deep tissue: For muscle damage from an injury, such as whiplash or back strain.
Sports: To help prevent athletic injury, keep the body flexible and heal the body should injury occur.
Chair: Massage of the upper body, while fully clothed and seated in a special portable chair.

The Healing Place of Cottage Grove provides all these types of massage.

Trigger Point Therapy

The Healing Place of Cottage Grove
www.thehealingplacecg.com

Trigger point therapy is also known as myotherapy or neuromuscular therapy. This massage modality was introduced by Janet Travell and David Simons and developed around the theory that pain is caused by myofascial trigger points which are tiny contraction knots that form in a muscle once it is injured or subjected to too much stress.

Muscles are made up of sacromeres, tiny units that alternately contract and relax in a synchronized fashion during body movement enabling blood circulation. Trigger points develop when sacromeres overlap and become entwined. Blood flow is impeded in the immediate area and the oxygen shortage results in the accumulation of metabolic wastes which irritate the knotted sacromeres.

These trigger points send out pain signals, not from its actual site but from another part of the muscle or body, hence the concept of referred pain. Trigger point therapists say that it is ineffective to treat muscle pain where it hurts. One has to look for the site of the trigger point and apply therapy there to guarantee successful treatment.

Travel and Simons reveal that headaches, neck and jaw pain, low back pain, tennis elbow, and carpal tunnel syndrome can be attributed to trigger points and that they are also the causes of pain in the shoulder, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle joints that is so often mistakenly diagnosed for arthritis, tendinitis, bursitis, or ligament injury.

Trigger points also display other seemingly unrelated symptoms such as dizziness, earaches, sinusitis, nausea, heartburn, false heart pain, heart arrhythmia, genital pain, and numbness in the hands and feet. Even fibromyalgia is said to have its beginnings with myofascial trigger points.

Using mainly finger pressure, trigger point therapy releases the interlocked sacromeres into a state where they are neither contracted nor stretched. Typical therapy lasts between 3-10 days in order to achieve marked results. In treating chronic conditions that have also persisted over long periods of time, results can be achieved in a span of 3 weeks.