You can’t beat a sports massage for injury prevention that you can ‘feel’. Whilst not as pleasurable as your typical ‘spa massage’, a good sports massage certainly has it’s moments and it will leave you feeling revived and ready to go again. For this reason, almost every elite endurance athlete now includes regular massage as part of their recovery and from my own experience a growing number of you guys are following suit.

Sports massage enhances recovery and helps prevent injuries in several ways. The most important effect of massage with respect to recovery is that it substantially increases blood circulation to the muscles and keeps it elevated for as long as an hour afterwards. This extra blood flow flushes metabolic wastes from the muscles, hurries in nutrients that repair muscle damage, and controls inflammation and the pain associated with it.

Massage also alleviates muscular trigger points (areas of sensitivity), mobilizes adhesions and breaks up scar tissue in the muscles, restoring normal function.

Yet another use for massage is identifying incipient injuries before they become painful during exercise, as well as muscle imbalances that could lead to injury and are probably compromising your technique, efficiency and end result. For this you should search for a massage therapist with an interest in endurance sports and even better, with experience of working with multi-sport athletes!

Sports massage may cost you anything between £25-£50+ depending on the therapists practice as well as their own experience. If money’s no object and you’re serious about performance (or you have a friend who works as a sports massage therapist), schedule one session per week during the build and peak phases of your training cycles as this is where the higher intensity sessions may start to play havoc with your bodies muscles. Some therapists may do half hour sessions, which will not cost you as much but would still allow a competent therapist to target specific muscles groups within your allotted time.

There are various other self massage techniques that you could and should practice, which you can learn from a whole host of various books and videos on the subject. If used properly, devices like the foam rollers used by physical therapists can yield some of the same benefits as sports massage, however in my own opinion you cannot beat a hands on sports massage from a therapist to fully enhance the benefits from the points mentioned above.

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Tags: Sports Injuries

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Sports Injuries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.