Sports Massage

A sports massage is a means of manipulating muscles and other soft tissue structures to: improve range of motion, increase blood flow to promote recovery, and to reduce pain.

Sports massage is a vital tool for athletes and should be used for performance optimisation.

It keeps the body supple and mobile, aids recovery time and reduces the likelihood of injury.

Overtime, muscles become overworked. Without adequate recovery, range of motion and mobility is reduced, stress is applied to surrounding structures and dysfunction occurs. 

For an athlete, if the specific movement patterns required for their sport are not achieved, surrounding muscles and ligaments must compensate, thus altering the mechanics and increasing the likelihood of injury.

There are 3 types of sports massage:

Pre event - a light massage. We use techniques such as percussion, which warms up the muscles without going too deep. You will be best equipped to tackle your workout after this form or treatment 

Post event - relaxing, light massage. Also referred to as a ‘flush out’. This helps to reduce the delayed onset muscles soreness, otherwise known as DOMS, which occurs after a heavy workout or an endurance event. Again, this isn’t a deep tissue massage as it aims to promote recovery after exercise. 

Maintenance - this is the most popular! 

We employ a range of techniques to work deep into the muscles. This is what comes to mind when you think of sports massage. 

It’s deep, it’s effective and it can be quite sore during and after. 

A little bit of discomfort is expected after receiving this, you may feel like you’ve done a workout!  

The idea is to increase blood flow and proprioception to muscles to help improve their range of motion and relieve some tension that may have developed due to overuse or a busy training schedule.