12 Ways Sports Massage Boosts Recovery & Performance

Sian Victoria © - Football pitch with players and mountain views

How Sports Massage Speeds Recovery & Prevents Injury

Whether you’re preparing yourself for your very first marathon, working out regularly with weights in the gym and want to maintain the same form, or are simply trying not to feel the pain in your back after each training session, taking care of your physical body becomes an everyday struggle. While we often discuss nutrition, proper sleep, and warm-ups, there is one of the most helpful elements of any workout routine that is treated as a luxury.

Sports massage is much more than an hour spent lying down in a spa with nice music playing in the background. It is a methodical technique for making sure that your muscles remain healthy, flexible, and able to withstand any stress that you give them. So, I’m going to talk about twelve ways regular sports massage therapy can influence your training sessions and improve your sporting performance.

1. Speed up your recovery time after tough sessions

Everyone knows how tired and achy one’s legs are two days after an extremely strenuous physical activity. One can say that delayed onset muscle soreness makes even such a simple thing as going downstairs look like a heroic deed.

Every time you train intensively and push your body to its limits, you end up creating tiny micro-tears in your muscles. It is a process that takes place naturally and leads to inflammation and stiffness.

A professional sports massage therapist will work on your damaged muscles in order to increase circulation and loosen the tightened muscles. In this way, your body will be able to deliver more oxygen and nutrients to the damaged area.

2. Increase joint mobility and muscle flexibility

If you are experiencing tightness in your muscles all the time, your mobility around your joints will become restricted. If you have tight hamstrings, restricted hip flexors or tight shoulders, you will have to double your efforts just to be able to go through your normal gait or to lift overhead.

In sports massage, the emphasis is placed on elongating the muscle belly fibres and the connective tissues. Techniques like deep tissue friction and myofascial release can be used to lengthen muscle fibres that have shortened because of repetitive motion or excessive strain.

With supple, long muscles, your joints will be able to move through their full range of motion without any effort. This will make your exercises easier, and you will be able to execute them with correct technique.

3. Break down stubborn scar tissue and adhesions

Should you have had experiences of having a small tear in your muscles, a sprain, or even muscle tightness caused by improper posture, your body would heal those injuries by laying down collagen fibres. Although healing is complete, the collagen fibres are often laid down haphazardly and not in straight lines. Such a formation is termed scar tissue or adhesion.

Scar tissue makes muscles feel bumpy and less flexible, whilst being sore to the touch. If not treated, adhesions may exert a pulling force on the surrounding muscles, causing other forms of injury in other parts of the body.

Transverse deep friction techniques that are employed in sports massage are meant to apply pressure across the injured fibre orientation. The pressure would help organise the collagen fibres and get rid of those difficult knotty spots, thus making the muscle elastic again so that it can contract and relax without restriction.

4. Boost blood circulation and oxygen delivery

Proper circulation forms the backbone of athletes’ healing and energy production. Your circulatory system acts to supply fresh, oxygen-filled blood and essential nutrients to all tissues in the body, while at the same time helping to eliminate waste products produced through exercise.

In the case of sports massage therapy, the manipulation of soft tissue causes a pumping action within the circulatory channels. The rhythmic strokes result in compression and release of the tissues and act to drive fluid through the blood vessels and promote increased blood flow into regions where there may be poor circulation as a result of tissue tightness. Good blood flow allows the muscles to access the necessary building blocks required for healing following exercise or injury.

5. Prevent soft tissue injuries before they start

Prevention is always better than cure. If you look at most sports injuries that occur in non-contact sports, like pulled hamstrings, calf strains, and shoulder impingements, these injuries rarely occur suddenly. These injuries usually occur due to tightness developing in the tissue after weeks of training until, eventually, it reaches a point where the tissue tears when put under stress.

Jeremeny from a clinic in London says routine visits to a sports massage therapist can serve as an early warning system. Your sports massage therapist can detect areas of tightness and inflammation before they become painful enough for you to notice them. Working out these tiny areas of tightness before they develop into major tears keeps you safe from getting injuries that keep you from participating in your sport for several months.

6. Flush out metabolic waste through lymphatic drainage

As a result of hard physical activity, metabolic waste products such as lactic acid, excess hydrogen ions and cell debris accumulate in your muscles. Although the body cleans itself of them over time, large amounts of training may lead to the accumulation of these substances in your body, making you feel exhausted and bloated.

The lymphatic system is an internal cleansing system of the body, but unlike the cardiovascular system, it does not have a heart to help circulate the fluid. Muscle movements and external pressure contribute to the movement of lymph fluid. The light movements of a sports massage activate the lymphatic vessels, thus promoting the elimination of fluid and metabolic waste from tired cells.

Sian Victoria © - Massage bed

7. Reduce physical stress and lower cortisol levels

High-volume training puts your nervous system under a lot of physiological stress. When you are always working at a very high level or training intensively, your sympathetic nervous system remains active, and there is increased production of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline.

When there are persistently high levels of cortisol, this affects muscle protein synthesis, sleep patterns, and slows down your recovery process. Massage therapy triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which is known as the rest and digest system. This kind of physical and rhythmic stimulation reduces heart rate and blood pressure, and sends a signal to your brain that it is time to relax. Reducing your cortisol levels means that your body is in the ideal hormonal environment.

8. Relieve chronic muscle tension and postural aches

We spend many hours of our day working at a desk, commuting or looking at screens, and then jump right into a rigorous workout. As a result of such a routine, we have developed muscle imbalances such as tight chest muscles, rounded shoulders and overworked lower back muscles.

When training with improper posture, there is inefficient firing of your primary muscles, so secondary muscles work extra hard. Sports massage works on such muscles, releases deep muscle tension and allows your body to regain its normal posture. Your neck, shoulders and lower back muscles will feel relaxed, and movement becomes much easier.

9. Improve sleep quality for deeper repair

Just ask any leading sports coach which is the most potent form of recovery, and they will say that it is good sleep. It is during sleep that your body produces almost all of its growth hormone and repairs the damage caused by training.

But physical pain, restless legs, and stress levels hamper your ability to get into deep and rejuvenating sleep stages. Sports massage helps by releasing tense areas and creating a parasympathetic response in the body; it makes your restless legs relax and relieves physical pain. It is no wonder that people who get sports massages sleep much better on the days following their sports massage sessions.

10. Enhance body awareness and mind-muscle connection

For efficient movement and proper lifting, proprioception is necessary. It is basically your brain's ability to understand where your body is in space and how much muscle tension it experiences. If your muscles are constantly tense, exhausted, or numbed by pain, then sensory feedback to your brain is not very strong.

In a process of massage therapy, you receive tactile feedback that helps you focus on areas that you tend to ignore. You immediately notice how tense your left calf is compared with your right calf, or how much tension you hold in your hips. All this increased awareness of your body can be easily applied to your workout routine. You will notice fatigue symptoms much faster and make adjustments to your form of exercise while using the right muscle group for your sport.

11. Optimise your pre-event readiness and focus

Although deep and restorative massage works best when you are training, sports massage that is faster and lighter works best just before you compete. Pre-event massage uses fast, energising strokes to stimulate your nerve endings, enhance blood flow in specific areas, and warm up your muscles.

This quick stimulation makes sure that your muscles are ready to perform explosively without experiencing the soreness that comes after deep tissue massage. Moreover, spending twenty minutes on your pre-race body conditioning just before competing will help you relax mentally and prepare yourself to be crisp and light at the starting line.

12. Support long-term athletic longevity and consistency

The secret to accomplishing any physical feat, be it gaining muscle mass, losing fat or running your own personal best in a marathon, lies in the ability to persevere. One simply cannot achieve anything if one has to spend weeks every so often recovering from injury or just plain fatigue that could easily have been avoided.

Having a sports massage on a regular basis is taking care of your athletic future. Being able to stay flexible and keeping your joints and nervous system in order allows you to continue training undisturbed for months on end.

To conclude

Sports massage therapy is much more than a luxurious indulgence. It is a very practical and effective practice for anyone who wants to perform at their best, recover quickly, and have training interrupted less often. From releasing tight muscles and flushing out metabolic waste to helping you sleep better and preventing injuries, the list of benefits is evident enough on its own.

Being an excellent sports person does not mean being rich enough to afford such luxuries. It's about paying attention to how your body works and giving yourself some maintenance treatments that will make any physical activity much more pleasurable. So, make sure your recovery process matches the level of your physical efforts.