Sports Massage is not just for athletes or for those who train, it is for anyone who wishes to address muscle tension and improve mobility. Sports Massage aids Postural Realignment, corrects Movement Patterns, and supports Injury Rehabilitation by reducing muscle tightness and realigning muscle fibres for optimal performance, enhancing the health of soft tissue, preventing injury.
What is Sports Massage?
Sports Massage aids the recovery and management of soft tissue damage caused by exercise and postural misalignment, preventing injury and chronic muscle conditions. Massage treatment targets soft tissue working to ensure they are in optimal health to function.
Sports Massage is an effective tool to manage muscle tension, avoid injury and enhance training. It works with soft tissue to improve the muscle’s ability to function efficiently and effectively using massage techniques to remove muscular adhesions, reduce muscle tightness and target muscle inhibition, improving mobility, reducing muscle stress, and increasing muscle activation.
Sports Massage plays a key role in post-training recovery which accelerates healing from musculoskeletal injuries and prevents future injuries. Sports Massage enables you to better manage everyday tasks and activities by improving your physical health and mobility and can be an effective tool in managing physical conditions and difficulties that come with age.
Who is it for?
- Athletes & Trained individuals who wish to improve Performance
- Active individuals looking for Maintenance and Injury Prevention
- Those recovering from Injury looking for treatment to work alongside their Rehabilitation
- Those suffering with Chronic Muscular Tension and Postural Misalignment
Injury Management & Prevention
Sports massage is a vital component of rehabilitation working with sub-acute and chronic stages of the soft tissue repair process. In understanding the Soft Tissue healing process, we assess and reassess the affected muscle tissue to establish the stage of recovery and monitor its functional development. Using neuromuscular techniques we target inhibited muscles to stimulate muscle tone, desensitise stressed muscle fibres and realign adhesive and damaged muscles fibres.
Sports & Training Performance
Sports Massage is a tool to enhance sports and training performance reducing muscle tension and removing adhesions which impact on the muscle’s ability to function efficiently. Physiologically, Sports Massage techniques enhances the ability of neurons within muscle fibres to “fire” up as well as to relax, increasing the tone of the muscle. Sports Massage also plays a key role in post-training recovery which can accelerate healing from musculoskeletal injuries and prevent future injuries.
Chronic Muscle Tension & Stress
Sports Massage enables you to better manage everyday tasks and activities by improving your physical health and mobility, an important part of adapting to physical conditions and difficulties that come with age. Through targeting muscle tension and dysfunction, Sports Massage addresses postural misalignment and compensatory movement patterns which are often the cause of chronic conditions, pain and reduced mobility.
Physical Fitness & Maintenance
Remedial exercises, postural realignment and conditioning training are necessary components in optimum movement patterns. Sports Massage works alongside these components using soft tissue techniques to realign muscle fibres and improve muscle activation. Poor functional control in movement can lead to musculoskeletal problems. Sports Massage targets muscle imbalances and postural dysfunction to improve and maintain good soft tissue health which transcends to correct body movement patterns.
The benefits of sports massage
There are many benefits to Sports Massage techniques influencing the physiological and physical health of the muscles and their ability to repair, recover and strengthen.
Maintenance
Sports Massage techniques are not just for trained athletes but for anyone who wishes to maintain their physical health with in-depth and focused soft tissue techniques.
- Reduces muscle tension
- Reduces stress by stimulating the parasympathetic system
- Increases mobility and flexibility
- Increases local circulation, flushing tissue with fresh nutrients aiding the removal of waste products
Remedial and Postural Health
Through targeting muscle tension and dysfunction, Sports Massage addresses postural misalignment and compensatory movement patterns which are often the cause of chronic pain and dysfunction.
- Increases mobility
- Helps to alleviate pain
- Increase ability to undertake daily activities and tasks
- Aids the improvement of postural alignment
- Helps to prevent risk to injury
Injury and Rehabilitation
Sports massage is a vital component of rehabilitation working with sub-acute and chronic stages of the soft tissue repair process.
- Improves local circulation aiding the recovery and repair of damaged tissue
- Helps to alleviate pain
- Reduces risk of further injury
- Breaks down scar tissue and adhesions
- Realigns and strengthens muscle fibre
Sports and Training Performance
By working with soft tissue at a physical and physiological level, Sports Massage repairs and prepares the muscle fibres to enable optimum performance in training and on competition day.
- Helps improve performance
- Aids effective strength training
- Removes adhesions and muscle restriction which limit one’s range of movement
- Faster recovery period by increasing the blood circulation to the affected area
- Stimulates inhibited muscles to increase tone and strength
Treatment Considerations
CONTRAINDICATIONS
Massage is a non-invasive tool that has beneficial effects on both body and mind. There are, however, conditions where massage treatment is not advisable as it could affect the treatment and symptoms of the condition. Contraindications will need to be considered before treatment can be undertaken.
TREATMENT PROCESS
We carefully undertake each stage of your Sports Massage treatment to ensure efficiency and effectiveness from assessment to treatment to aftercare.
In order to gain greater access to muscle tissue, and to apply massage techniques effectively, adaptation of body position will be necessary. We do this with the client in mind, being aware of mobility limitations and remaining respectful of personal boundaries.
All techniques require palpation of muscle tissue and some techniques may be uncomfortable and possibly sore during and after treatment. You will be notified before the technique is applied and we will never go beyond the point of the client’s tolerability.
Meet Sophie Barrett MSc, BA (Hons), Dip, CertHE
I am a qualified Level 4 Sports Massage Therapist and member of the Association of Soft Tissue Therapists specialising in Soft Tissue Rehabilitation, Muscle Strength & Conditioning and Postural Realignment.
Through broad training and experience I have a thorough understanding of the biomechanics of the musculoskeletal system in dysfunction and healthy functioning. Having worked in the fitness industry for ten years as a qualified Pilates instructor, and with training in postural analysis and movement correction, I have worked with a range of individuals of varying abilities and needs from rehabilitation to triathletes to prenatal.
Sports massage benefits everyone. It is the perfect compliment for sports enthusiasts and gym bunnies who wish to get more out of their training, a vital component for those recovering from injury, and an effective tool to target chronic muscular tension and stress.
With all clients I work to reduce muscle imbalances and improve postural alignment through soft tissue manipulation, muscle activation techniques and functional movement exercises. Increasing functional mobility improves one’s day to day living as well as sports performance and Sports Massage is an effective way of achieving healthy movement.
I work from hands on to hands off from soft tissue applications to strength and conditioning training regimes, providing a service of in-depth analysis of your functional movement. We work with your body and its complexities to reduce pain, increase mobility, prevent injury and enhance performance.
Clients include:
- those rehabilitating from injury and wishing to get back to their previous level of fitness;
- those with postural misalignment and chronic muscle tension;
- those in sports or gym training wishing to improve their mobility and performance, and prevent injury;
- those wishing to reduce muscle tension and body stress.