How Can Sports Massage Help Improve Performance?
Athletes push themselves to the utmost limits and constantly ask more of their bodies. Physical stress brought on by training and overuse can result in discomfort, chronic fatigue, muscle soreness, inflammation, and injury. Recovery is crucial to sustaining training, enhancing outcomes, and reaching peak athletic performance. Sports massage therapists will incorporate massage therapy as an extra part of their rehabilitation plan to improve performance and increase mobility. Massage therapy helps athletes avoid injuries.
What is a sports massage?
Sports massage is a collection of massage techniques achieved by carefully adjusting the soft tissues linked to a particular sport or type of exercise. It is not a single type of massage. In sports massage therapy, three commonly used styles or methods are effleurage, petrissage, and deep transverse friction massage. A sports massage often involves a quick massage, stretching, and other techniques, depending on the type of activity you play. It can be tailored to be used as a post-workout massage meant to reduce soreness and increase flexibility, or as a pre-workout stretch and opportunity to warm up the muscles. Including athletic massage in your regimen will be very beneficial if you want to reach a fitness goal. Your sports massage therapist can assist you in reaching your objectives, even small ones like improving your flexibility or preparing your muscles for a little exertion, by incorporating massage into the proper combination.
Improves range and mobility
Advanced gymnastics and Olympic lifting motions, as well as high-intensity functional training, CrossFit, HIIT, and Olympic lifting, all require mobility. An athlete’s range of motion, flexibility, and joint mobility can all be significantly increased by massage therapy using myofascial release. Sports massage may be a highly effective method for identifying inflammatory problem areas that may impede mobility and impair range of motion.
Reduces stress and anxiety
This therapeutic massage helps to reduce anxiety, tension, and stress. You may improve your athletic performance and outcomes if you can effectively reduce anxiety and stress while elevating your mood, as many performance-related factors are psychological. It’s well known that receiving a massage helps people unwind and reduce stress and anxiety.
Reduces muscle fatigue
One method used in sports massage to get rid of muscle adhesions is cross-fiber friction. Additionally, deep tissue stripping and pin-and-stretch techniques are used to lengthen and stretch the fibers of muscle and fascia. This relieves trigger points by assisting in the reduction of taut muscle fibers and fascia and collaborating with ischemia compression.
Improves recovery time
Recovery may be just as important as the activity itself, especially if you’re training for a competition or event. Sports massage at Pause Studio can hasten your recuperation by reducing soreness in your muscles and increasing blood flow to them.
Enhances athletic performance and recovery
Research has shown that sports massage improves range of motion and flexibility while lowering soreness in the muscles, which benefits athletes in terms of performance. Compared to those who didn’t receive sports massages, those who did so reported significantly less muscle soreness before and after exercise. Sports massage can improve range of motion and flexibility while also helping to reduce muscle fatigue. This is especially beneficial if you work out frequently or perform physically demanding tasks.
