Massage & Bodywork

New Age Considerations

Not long ago, massage was considered a specialty served only at women's spas and for the rich.  Athletes have discovered the many benefits of body work over the past couple of decades, which include faster recovery from injury, increased blood flow, decreased soreness, and improved energy.

Sports massage, hot rock therapy, deep tissue work, rolfing, yoga, pilates, chiropractic adjustments, and other techniques we will be explored along with the other "standard" training suggestions.

Bob Saxton on Massage and It's Benefits:

Ideally massage works best prior to an event after some warm up to get the blood going. Prior to an event massage helps loosen muscles up, decrease anxiety, and can give an invigorated feeling. Rhythmic pumping techniques are used to achieve this. This is massage done prior to an event. It’s not aimed at treating anything specific, but basically just gets the athlete ready to “rumble.”

I would recommend to all athletes to practice some form of meditation, visualization, prayer or whatever assists in preparing for battle. Develop a routine that’s right for you. Include into your mental psyche that you won’t get hurt. Imagine yourself as a giant, invincible, or whatever you can come up with that you can relate with to accomplish this. See yourself mentally executing proper technique…the perfect form tackle, proper body positioning, and driving through your opponent. After 30 plus years of being around football I am convinced that mental preparation is every bit as important as physical preparation for decreasing the possibility of injury.

 
For athletic enhancement massage as I like to call it, several techniques and/or tests are done prior to massaging. These assessments are what factors into a plan of action that help predict the best possible outcome for the athlete. These include not just feeling muscles or other soft tissues, but assessing overall structure of the body, joint range of motion, joint movement, neuromuscular components, overall health of the athlete, and to some degree … psychological make up of the athlete and assessing what the actual goal of treatment is.

Massage isn’t a cure all in the grand scheme of things. It is however an important tool in the arsenal of benefits that are available to the athlete and have been since the ancient Greek Games. Some of the ways massage is used are in conjunction with other healthcare modalities such as chiropractic, medical physicians, and physical therapists, etc. As a therapist I might be inheriting the treatment of old injuries, assisting in the correction of posture, helping stretch the athlete with a variety stretching techniques, assisting in exercises or giving general health advice relating to performance.

The average person would be very surprised about the amount of knowledge that goes into “just giving a massage.” My main philosophy is this: I don’t like to work on game days….if I don’t have to. If I am working on game day it’s generally not good news for the team. So the best way to not work on game days is identifying athlete weaknesses and working to reduce the possibility of them getting injured in the first place. So to large degree massage among other things is preventative and prolongs an athletes career. In a later writing I want to get down and dirty about some of the things I used to see in younger athletes.

When treating injuries I might use ice or heat (DO NOT use heat at home unless you’re told to do so by a health professional), depending on where an athlete is at with the injury. I might use athletic taping to prevent further injury or use elastic tape for certain soft tissue problems to reduce pain or increase function. Analgesics is another product that might be employed to help reduce pain spasm pain cycles. Some massage techniques might be employed to improve elasticity, break down adhesions or restrictions in various soft tissue structures, improve fluid exchange, improve overall function, decrease spasm and pain etc.

One area where I personally don’t feel massage gets enough credit for is in the rehabbing of extremities such as knees, shoulders, elbows etc. It’s inefficient just to treat the joint effected without treating the structures that surround or cross through that joint. It all works together hand in hand. There’s a time to do things and a time not to. When an injury occurs, there’s a thing called phases of regeneration. Basically, this is when you become injured your body has a predictable time frame in which certain physiological changes occur to start the road to recovery. This in mind, massage isn’t always your best course of action depending on the stage of the injury. This is what we call a contraindication.

Some of these factors might be open wounds, muscle or tendon ruptures, contusions, inflammation, burns etc. …IF YOUR NOT SURE CONSULT A DOCTOR OR HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL IMMEDIATELY.

There are even rules for just giving a basic massage. Breaking these rules can have serious consequences. In what I do for a football team, I take these timelines very seriously to make predictions as to whether a player should come back to play or not and when, and pass down my feelings to the coaching staff. Sometimes I take the teams schedule into consideration, or where they’re at on the depth chart, where we’re at within the season, and of course the long and short term effects the injury can have for the athlete if it worsens or threatens the health of the athlete.

In the case of younger athletes the rules applied are much more stringent. Kids are still growing both physically and in mental maturity which means this…you (youth athletes) don’t have the life experiences to make informed decisions about what’s best for you like your parents or doctors can. It’s their job to look out for those kinds of things and not yours. Athletics do great things for kids. The skills and lessons you learn as an athlete will carry with you for the rest of your lives. The discipline, mental toughness, and seeing things through, win or lose with dignity are just some of the things you learn as an athlete that will make you future leaders within the communities of an even better America.

Don’t take athletics so serious that you forget to have fun and have a smile on your face. Yet, know that there’s a difference between goofing off and having fun. Fun is what you have when you master certain skills taught by your coaches that help keep you safe while enjoying what you do. Goofing off and playing with reckless abandonment and with poor fundamental skills can get you or somebody else hurt. A good example of this is lowering your head in football. The skills you learn should become second nature so that when you play, you play safe.

Show sportsmanship and be respectful citizens on and off the field. Have the courage to do the right thing even when the superstar athletes do not.
 

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