7 Benefits of Sports Massage
Athletics can take many forms, including daily swim sessions, day hikes, and traditional sports. Sometimes, juggling your family, home responsibility, and job can feel like a competitive feat of endurance. In the midst of this chaos, you might feel a real need for some quiet time.
Although this is a perfectly valid reason for a massage, a sports massage is a specialized form of therapy. Its main purpose is to maximize athletic performance. We’ve included scientific evidence to support the following seven benefits of booking a sports massage therapy appointment with our team:
- Calms performance anxiety
- Enhances sleep
- Expands range of motion
- Reduced risk of injury
- Boosts post-exercise recovery
- Supports rehabilitation efforts
- Promotes a wellness focus
Benefit 1: Calms Performance Anxiety
Competitive sports can be a pressure cooker environment. The pressures of fans, performance metrics, and reaching your goals can become quite overwhelming. If you’ve followed professional sports, for example, you’ve seen many examples of individuals who’ve had too much over the years.
Performance anxiety can unexpectedly descend upon you like a thick fog, making it difficult for you to take the next steps. Sports massage is one tool that athletes have used to calm this form of anxiety. In fact, a recent study found that sports massage reduced performance anxiety by more than half among athletes preparing for an event.
Benefit 2: Enhances Sleep
Sports massage can do more than calm your racing doubts before performing. It can enhance your quality of sleep. As your pain and tension are relieved from massage, you aren’t bothered by distracting pain or tension. When you’re more comfortable, it’s easier to fall and remain asleep.
Benefit 3: Expands Range of Motion
While muscles aren’t responsible for your range of motion and flexibility like joints are, they still play an important role in preserving your full range of motion. This is because the muscles are joined to the tendons, which are a special type of tissue that connect the muscles with each side of a joint.
When you have supple, well-maintained muscles, it gives you the right amount of strength to balance the motion of each joint. You have even movement for each direction of travel. If you didn’t have appropriately balanced muscle tone and flexibility, for example, you’d be able to initiate a golf swing, but you wouldn’t be able to rotate successfully into a good follow-through.
Benefit 4: Reduces Risk of Injury
When your muscles are maintained and in better condition due to sports massage, you can reduce your risk of injury. In addition to balanced movement of your limbs, such muscle fitness helps you maintain proper posture. Excellent posture is about more than looking good. It helps you balance your body weight and, therefore, minimizes your risk of falls.
Benefit 5: Boosts Post-exercise Recovery
When you exercise, you may have noticed that you often don’t feel sore until a day or two later. Contrary to popular belief, this isn’t due to the fact that you’re in better shape. It’s due to the fact that you’re human.
Muscles are made from multiple fibers that develop miniature tears when they are worked or moved beyond a certain point. These small tears are a natural consequence of movement and actually help you build stronger, larger muscles.
When your muscles tear, it causes inflammation to occur as your body sends in a host of extra fluid, immune cells, and biochemicals that accelerate this inflammation. The primary purpose of this response is to keep you from developing an infection.
When muscles repair or regenerate, new muscle fibers are formed. Since there are more muscle fibers, muscles gradually grow. This gradually results in larger, stronger muscles and is an example of how regular exercise is crucial for progress.
Benefit 6: Supports Rehabilitation Efforts
Another benefit of regular exercise is that it can help you avoid injury. If, however, you are unfortunate enough to sustain a sports-related injury, we’re equipped to assist you with your rehabilitation program.
Sports massage helps give your body more of what it needs to rebuild itself successfully. Rehabilitation requires optimal nutrition, adequate hydration, and sufficient rest. It also requires targeted exercise to encourage the body’s tissue repair processes.
While sports massage can be used to gently target a particular area, some of its biggest impacts are from its general effect on the body. Sports massage can help your body more efficiently deliver proteins, oxygen, and other vital nutrients to tissues as they are repairing themselves.
Another benefit of sports massage directly related to rehabilitation is that it can increase your flexibility and prime your body to move through its full range of motion. In addition to preventing further injury, maximizing your range of motion can help stave off the boredom that can set in during somewhat repetitive rehabilitation exercises.
Benefit 7: Promotes a Wellness Focus
The seventh benefit of sports massage is that it helps you focus on maximizing your wellness and optimizing your health. When you receive routine massages, you become more mindful of your body and how it is performing. You also get a clearer sense of how your body responds to nutrition, activity, and other healthy lifestyle choices.
Become a Beneficiary of Sports Massage
Investing in your sports performance begins with an investment in yourself. Sports massage provides multiple benefits that are being supported by new research all the time. If you’re interested in seeing what sports massage therapy can do for you, please schedule an appointment with our Denver Sports Massage therapy team today.
