Irrespective of your sport, exercise routine, or activity level, your body is the pillar of your performance. The more you exert it, the higher the chances of immense strain that, when not treated, will take its toll before you realise.
If you frequently feel your muscles stiffening, causing pain, and restricting your range of motion, then it’s time to pay attention and give them the care they need. In such cases, it’s not just rest but specific therapeutic care, such as sports massage treatments, that can help ease the pain and get you back on track. Many don’t realise that physical strain can also lead to emotional stress, and that’s where the benefits of sports massage come into play.
So, what exactly is a sports massage, what are its physical and emotional benefits, and when and where should you get it? Let’s explore these questions in detail.
What Is Sports Massage?
Sports massage is a systematic and focused therapy that targets the muscles in a particular sport or activity. It’s highly purposeful and aims to treat and relieve muscle pain.
Sports massage employs various techniques to reduce muscle soreness and accelerate recovery while improving range of motion and flexibility for better movement. These techniques usually include deep tissue massage, myofascial release, trigger point therapy, and effleurage/petrissage movements, specific to muscles in anatomic areas that undergo the most activity and strain.
Sports massage differs considerably from regular massage and focuses on general stress management, pain reduction, and relaxation. Sports massage addresses injury or strain-related muscles affected by the specific activities one performs. For instance, a footballer may get sports massages for their feet and thighs. A sports massage therapist primarily focuses on pre- or post-performance milestones, in terms of training and rehabilitation.
Who Typically Uses It?
The benefits of sports massage are often apparent for athletes, given their rigorous schedule of activities that can lead to muscle strain and emotional stress. However, sports massage is a highly personalised and tailored form of massage therapy that aids in alleviating tension by focusing on specific muscle groups. Hence, although typically for athletes, sports massage benefits just about anyone who partakes in any form of physical exercise or event. This aspect is mainly because a sports massage is often an excellent way to prepare for an activity, as it loosens up your muscles and relaxes you physically and mentally.
Physical Benefits of Sports Massage
The most obvious benefits of sports massage pertain to your physical health. Here are the key ways a sports massage helps you physically:
Enhanced Muscle Recovery
If you exercise regularly, you’re likely familiar with pulled muscles. Even if you’re used to living with them, these deep distresses can worsen if left untreated. Sports massage helps by targeting such torn or strained muscles, relaxing them, and improving blood circulation in the affected muscles to speed up their recovery.
Improved Flexibility and Range of Motion
Sports massage techniques are specifically for deep tissues. A proper massage stretches and mobilises these tissues to release tension and reduce the pain they are causing. This aspect leads to faster recovery and improves muscle flexibility, thus increasing your freedom of movement when using them.
Injury Prevention
Improved flexibility, reduced muscle tension, and better blood circulation contribute to injury prevention. Consistent sports massage treats the affected muscles and, in turn, optimises your biomechanics, which minimises the chances of ligament sprains, muscle strains and related injuries.
Pain Relief and Muscle Tension Reduction
With a strong focus on deep tissues and muscle relaxation, sports massage aids peak performance by eliminating the pain caused by muscle strains. The improved blood circulation helps provide oxygenated blood to the fatigued muscles, which results in faster pain reduction. It also increases soft tissue elasticity to reduce muscle tension.
Performance-Related Benefits
Alongside physical benefits, sports massage also has various performance-related benefits. Let’s take a look at them below:
Boosts Circulation and Nutrient Delivery
Relaxing injured or strained muscles leads to better blood circulation and improves lymphatic circulation due to the vigorous contact between a therapist’s fingers and the skin. When circulation improves, muscles receive nutrients and oxygen quickly. With better nutrient delivery, athletes can achieve reduced fatigue and recovery time, which allows them to maintain high performance and improve over time.
Improves Athletic Performance
Injured and strained muscles can recover faster with better blood circulation and nutrient delivery, a crucial requirement for athletes under rigorous training who often experience fatigued muscles. Regular sports massage to the required areas reduces pain and muscle strain, and ramps up endorphin production to unlock better athletic performance.
Speeds Up Recovery Time
One of the most considerable benefits of a sports massage for athletes is the faster recovery time. The proper massage and techniques aim to speed up the time-strained muscles need to recover fully, achieved by decreasing inflammation. In turn, this helps heal the micro-tears in the muscle fibres and eliminate metabolic waste. As a result, you bounce back quicker, train better, and perform at your highest levels.
Mental and Emotional Benefits
The benefits of sports massage go beyond your physical health and performance capabilities by aiding mental wellness. Here’s how:
Reduces Stress and Anxiety
Various medical studies have shown the ability of regular sports massages to reduce anxiety and stress that are often a result of continuous training, as well as participating in competitions. While injury has physical implications, stress has emotional ones, which can run deeper and be harder to eliminate. Sports massage helps alleviate this stress by relieving muscle tension, which leaves your body feeling looser and more comfortable, thus releasing mood-boosting endorphins.
Enhances Mental Clarity and Focus
A sports massage lets your nervous system calm down, gradually allowing your body to breathe, reducing stress hormones, and helping you feel calmer. This factor results in a mental reset that enables you to regain emotional clarity and the focus you may have lost due to injury-induced mental stress.
Promotes Overall Relaxation
Proper sports massage techniques allow your body to relax completely, which creates a cascade of free serotonin, endorphins, and dopamine. Muscle relaxation also releases cortisol, which puts you in a harmonised mental state that ensures mental well-being. This state of overall relaxation is imperative, especially for those who engage with sports and other activities daily, as an unrelaxed or anxious state of mind can be detrimental to performance.
When to Get a Sports Massage
Sports massage has many benefits, but when is the ideal time to get one? Let’s break it down below:
Pre-Event Massage
Pre-event sports massage is one that athletes get a day or two before their event, or even a few hours before it. This massage helps enhance their muscle elasticity, increase blood circulation, and reduce muscle tension. These benefits make athletes feel more flexible and limber, ready to perform at the highest level. A notable advantage this provides is the decreased injury risk during the event itself, and a boost to the athlete’s mental focus.
Post-Event Massage
This form of physical therapy occurs when athletes get a massage after intense training or competition. Post-event sports massages focus on muscle recovery by reducing inflammation and soreness. They also help remove metabolic waste like lactic acid, which allows faster recovery and reduced muscle strain.
Regular Maintenance Massage
Amateur and professional athletes often leverage regular sports massage therapy to maintain their physical conditioning. Regular massages prevent knotted muscles that can quickly cause injuries. Maintenance massages provide improved range of motion, flexibility, and overall better mental well-being, which allows the athlete to retain peak condition daily.
Who Can Benefit From Sports Massage?
Although sports massages are typically for athletes, they're not solely for them. A sports massage is equally beneficial for everyday people who experience physical stress and tension from daily hustle and bustle, such as office workers, gym-goers, trade professionals who stand for long periods, parents carrying children and managing chaotic routines, and recreational athletes.
Where to Get a Sports Massage in Melbourne?
In Melbourne, you can get a professional and customised sports massage at Advance Osteopathy, where we combine deep clinical expertise and real-world experience to create massage therapy that suits unique body mechanics. While there’s no dearth of sports massage providers in Melbourne, we diagnose what’s happening inside and guide the treatment to your specific health objectives.
Conclusion
Pushing yourself to your limits may help you fulfil your performance-related goals, but sustainably means caring for your physical and mental health. At the same time, you train, exercise, and perform. Sports massage therapy will help you do just that, and unlock higher performance levels in whatever you do.