How Can Massage Help With Sports Injuries?

If you’re an athlete — recreational, amateur, professional or otherwise — you may be all too familiar with injuries of all sorts and the many common forms of treatment for them. Traditional treatment options for sports injuries include: RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation), ice baths, physiotherapy, strength training, and even surgery and rehabilitation. But what about massage?

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario have found that massage for sports-related injuries offers several benefits:

●     Reduced tension

●     Improved relaxation

●     Increased range of motion

●     Decreased stiffness and soreness

●     Improved performance

●     Fewer recurrences and aggravations of injuries

You may be tempted to consign massage to the self-care, lifestyle or cosmetic category as opposed to an option for treating or preventing sports injuries, but don’t be too quick to do so. Massage therapy in SW Calgary is an increasingly popular and common option for treating and preventing sports injuries. There are four especially significant benefits of massage for athletes of all stripes.

Pain relief

Receiving massage therapy near you can help athletes obtain pain relief from pain caused by the injury itself, and even pain caused by physical therapy during rehabilitation. The staff at a chiroclinic in SW Calgary who provide sports massage will, after assessing your physical condition and injury history, identify the pressure points to target to relieve injury and rehabilitation-related pain. They can also develop a treatment plan for providing relief from chronic pain often associated with recurring or lingering injuries.

Without drugs

Undergoing massage therapy at a chiro clinic near you for pain relief may be an especially attractive option for athletes because it offers the potential for pain relief without rehabilitative drugs or painkilling drugs. While rehabilitative and painkilling drugs can provide effective relief when taken as directed, they also expose athletes to the risk of developing a dependency. Massage therapy can provide pain relief without those risks.

Improved flexibility

Muscles and ligaments that are too tense or too stiff are muscles and ligaments that are more prone to injury than muscles, ligaments and tissues at their most flexible. Massage therapy stretches muscle tissue and helps to break down tension within muscles to increase the flexibility within your joints and around your body.

The same massage treatment that improves your physical flexibility can also improve the circulation of your blood throughout your body. Improved circulation improves the body’s ability to recover from injuries while also reducing the risk of aggravations and recurrence.

Injury prevention

Injuries obviously happen during games and matches in all sports, but they can develop outside and before those games and matches, too — even during training during or outside your sports or activity’s season. If you find the physical training associated with your activity produces soreness, inflexibility or injuries, as a chiropractor near you if pre-training massage might help your muscles to relax properly to allow you to train optimally to improve your performance without increasing the risk of developing debilitating injuries that’ll keep you on the sidelines.

Massage therapy for treating or preventing sports injuries is an ideal complementary form of treatment for many athletes of all ages and types. We don’t recommend abandoning other forms of treatment for massage, but encourage you to contact a chiropractor near you for advice about adding massage into your prevention and treatment regimen.

At Calgary Spine & Sport, we’re committed to physical fitness, healthy activity and peak performance, too. Let our professionals help you to stay healthy, get healthy and return to peak performance after injury.