If you’re an athlete, you know precisely how rewarding it can be to run a faster mile and lift a heavier weight. It takes hours and hours of dedicated training to make those gains, and you have a right to enjoy them when they come. However, those hours and hours of training have a way of making you tired, sore, and achy. When you feel tired and weak, you might feel like you just want to give up. It’s very hard to set that personal best marathon time if you have to take time off to deal with a sore back, or if you toe the starting line with tight back muscles.
Massage Therapy
If you’ve been running or lifting weights for a while, you’ve probably heard of foam rolling. Foam rolling is the process of, as the name implies, rolling a foam bar over your sore muscles. Foam rollers differ in terms of density, which affects the efficacy of each foam rolling session. Also, you are the one applying the foam roller yourself, so you might not have a good idea of how much pressure to use. Foam rollers are pretty uncomfortable, and many people do not know how much pain is appropriate. That’s because you’re not a trained therapist, but that’s perfectly fine. There are trained therapists who know exactly how much pressure to apply and how to work out kinks.
What Happens
A little bit of understanding of muscle and bone soreness can help you understand what is happening and how therapy works. When you work your muscles, you create tiny tears in the muscle fibers. These tears then heal back stronger, making your muscles larger and more efficient. Those tears, just like any other tears in your body, can be painful at times. Increased blood flow helps sweep away toxins and introduces oxygen and nutrients to help the muscles heal. Skilled therapists can massage you to encourage increased blood flow, which helps the muscles heal faster.
Bone and joint pain is oftentimes the result of something going wrong with your exercise regimen, but that does not mean they’re always serious. Massage therapy will likely help ease your pain. Oftentimes, the pain you feel is because you are hitting the ground awkwardly while running or jumping. That could very well be the result of awkward posture or an imbalance in your gait. Talented therapists can address what might be causing your pain and correct the imbalance.
At Living Well Balanced, they seek to address all of the reasons you might be experiencing pain. Those problems could be muscular or skeletal but likely, it is some combination of the two. That’s why the skilled professionals feature chiropractic methods as well as massage therapy. When used in conjunction, they help you recover from your hard workouts much faster.
