Massage Therapy - The Secret To Injury Prevention
Can Massage Prevent Injury?
There are so many ways someone can get injured. From pro athletes to stay-at-home parents, people are always finding ways to injure themselves. In this blog, we’ll be discussing ways we utilize Massage Therapy to help prevent injuries and keep you in a low-risk state.
Based on professional observations and experiences, many athletes and sports medicine personnel believe that massage can provide several benefits to the body such as increased blood flow, reduced muscle tension, neurological excitability, and an increased sense of well-being.
How Does Massage Affect Our Bodies?
We’ll explain exactly how massage affects the many systems and mechanisms in our bodies below.
BIOMECHANICAL MECHANISMS
Massage can produce mechanical pressure, which is expected to increase muscle compliance resulting in an increased range of joint motion decreased passive stiffness, and decreased active stiffness.
NEUROLOGICAL MECHANISMS
Mechanical pressure might help to increase blood flow by increasing the arteriolar pressure, as well as increasing muscle temperature from friction. Depending on the massage technique, mechanical pressure on the muscle is expected to increase or decrease neural excitability.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS
A reduction in anxiety and an improvement in mood state are also caused by relaxation after massage.
PHYSIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS
Changes in parasympathetic activity (as measured by heart rate, blood pressure, and heart rate variability) and hormonal levels (as measured by cortisol levels) following massage results in a relaxation response.
Can Regular Massages Reduce Your Chance of Injury?
These benefits of massage are expected to help athletes by enhancing performance and reducing injury risk. If you’re saying to yourself “I’m not an athlete, so I don’t need to use massage for injury prevention”, you’d be mistaken.
Here at Sarrica Physical Therapy & Wellness, we educate clients to invest in themselves. We must look at our lives as a sport and train accordingly. Having regular massages can help reduce the likelihood of an injury. Whether it’s swinging a bat for a living or swinging a hammer, competitive weight lifting, or moving boxes to a new office space it’s important for our bodies to be able to perform.
Life comes at us fast and we never know when we may need to spring into action. When those moments arise, having a body and mind that’s ready can make all the difference. If you feel you can benefit from Massage Therapy and want to learn more about injury prevention, please call Sarrica Physical Therapy & Wellness at our Brooklyn or Manhattan office at 347.560.6920.
