Whether you favour high intensity exercise or enjoy the lighter exertion of yoga, sports massage has a range of benefits to offer various people.
Sports massage is commonly performed on athletes and is a popular technique involving applying different types of pressure on the body. It’s designed specifically to treat musculoskeletal injuries, pain and soft tissues injuries.1
Here are just some of the benefits of sports massage you may not be aware of:
Helps prevent injury
Being a deep tissue massage, a sports massage is ideal for anyone struggling with pain or discomfort in a specific area. It’s the ideal remedy for ‘athletically-induced’ aches and pains, helping to increase blood flow to provide more oxygen and nutrients, to aid healing and recovery. It’s also regularly used as a preventative treatment by breaking down adhesions; small bundles of collagen fibres, helping to decrease muscle tightness and increase movement.2
Support good posture
If you’re sat behind a desk for long periods of the day and not sitting correctly, your muscles can shorten and pull your joints into positions that, over time, can reduce function and increase the chances of repetitive strain injuries. Sports massage can help with this by both reducing pain and increasing your range of movement.3
Maintaining a good posture is also a great way to ease pressure on our joints, it prevents irritating aches and pains springing up and can even make us feel better mentally and emotionally.
Reduce headaches
Headaches and migraines are very common and often they are caused by simple muscular tension through poor posture of the head, neck and shoulders. Over time, all these muscles get very tight, potentially constricting the nerves and blood vessels which travel through them and up into the head. This can be easily treated with sports massage, helping to reduce muscular tension and improve blood flow through the muscles.4
Stress buster
If the overall goal of a massage is to provide relaxation and wellbeing, having a sports massage helps to release endorphins (‘happy’ and ‘pain killing’ hormones), which are known to increase relaxation, relieve pain and ease the symptoms of anxiety and depression.5
So, why not give a sports massage a go? You might find you get more than just a performance enhancing boost and with our Good All Round cash plan you can claim money back towards the cost of treatment and much more.
For more information about our Good All Round cash plan, check out sovereignhealthcare.co.uk/good-all-round.
Sources:
1 Sports Massage UK 2 Physio.co.uk 3 DISC 4 CPM Sports 5 Physio.co.uk