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Injuries And Pain:
A Familiar Challenge To Nearly Every Athlete, Active Person, Worker and retiree |
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| Massage is a great hands on treatment that not only prevents injury but accelerates recovery |
Treatment available at Pro-Am Sports Injury Clinic
Sports Massage includes techniques to keep muscle pliable, when dealing with scar tissue a technqiue called frictions can be used. It is a direct deep pressure onto the scar tissue with small circular movements. I use basic massage techniques to warm up the area first. Soft Tissue Release. I found that frictions didn't always work as a treatment particularly for sports people. So I looked around and found a course on soft tissue release. We know that movement is essential to the scar tissue healing and realignment process, and that there are ways of applying pressure to scar tissue that help to realign it—Soft Tissue Release employs them both simultaneously. It’s the synchronization of pressure, movement and stretch that realigns the scar tissue faster and more effectively than by applying them separately. The difference is dramatic, people tend to notice right away that significant changes are occurring. This can also be combined with Muscle Energy Techniques. Muscle Energy Techniques are stretching techniques which involves the subjects own muscular energy to help release holding tension. For those who have had long standing problems the tissue may be to sensitive to for any type of massage. This is where myofascial release is very helpful. The Therapist will apply mild, sustained pressure to gently stretch and soften the fascia. The fascia itself can be the cause for some injuries. You will find when treating injuries that one technique will not work used on its own. It's using a combination of techniques that will work not just the muscles but on the neuromuscular element. I believe that improvements are not just to be made in the clinic but outside as well. part of my time is used to explain home treatments. This way the client themselves can learn to understand the injury and how it feels. Exercises are given in relation to the injury to help further. These help with balance, strength a flexibility and also postural and technucal re-education. |
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Many people unfortunately believe that getting injured, being in pain and struggling for months or even years to recover is just the price they pay for being involved in their activity whether a high performance athlete or a desk worker. Without the latest information to go on, they don’t realise that:
If you want to be more empowered in your recovery process, gaining a better understanding of how your muscles heal is the place to start, because:
You can not break a bone or sprain a ligament without injuring muscle's too. Your muscular system will tend to fail first and even if it doesn’t, your muscular system will quickly become imbalanced in compensating for the injury. Why Your Muscles Have To Heal Differently Than Your Bones, And Why Your Muscles Are More Prone To Healing Problems If you fracture a bone, as long as it is set and held in place properly, it will tend to heal without further assistance, in such a way that it ends up stronger where it broke than it was before the fracture. Bone tissue heals in a process that creates a bond that is denser and harder than the original bone structure. When it comes to your muscles, however, healing has to include flexibility and mobility. Anything that would make your muscles too dense and inflexible would be a liability and that is essentially what happens in the initial phases of muscular repair. Your muscles do not actually heal with just muscle tissue, but with "denser" substances including collagen. The resulting scar tissue is initially much less elastic, and consequently weaker and prone to re-injury.
Your muscles, therefore, are more prone to having difficulties with healing: incomplete healing, loss of strength and/or recurring injury. What Your Muscles Need In Order To Recover In order for your muscles to function properly, all of their fibers need to be aligned in the same direction of function. In the same way that your car wouldn’t be drivable if its tires were all aligned in different directions, your muscles wouldn’t work if their fibers were all pulling in different directions at once. The fibers have to be parallel. When you have a muscle that has been injured the initial repair process creates a "patch" of random scar tissue fibers, the random alignment and reduced flexibility of these new fibers becomes a "weak link" in your muscle. If the healing process does not progress far enough beyond this point, the injury will leave your muscle under functioning, weaker, and in a less-flexible state that is highly susceptible to re-injury. In order for your injured muscle to fully recover, the scar tissue needs to become aligned and integrated with the muscle fibers. This doesn’t just happen by itself, it requires movement and a certain amount of stretching (just the opposite of what bones need to heal). The right amount of movement, (which varies according to the injury) at the right time and intervals, repeatedly breaks up the scar tissue fibers in a beneficial way, and they gradually become realigned in the same direction as the rest of your muscle. But even with all the best rehab. exercises and stretches, it can be a slow and painful process that remains incomplete after weeks or months of hard work. There is another issue that needs to be understood and addressed, if you want to be assured of the fullest possible recovery. The reality is when the scar tissue “integration process” is complete, your problems can continue, because Your Muscle Isn’t The Only Thing That Gets “Damaged” Traditional forms of rehabilitation often fail to restore full function, because they tend to fixate on the individual muscles (and other tissues) that have been injured. It’s not enough to focus solely on trying to stretch, strengthen or otherwise rehabilitate your injured muscles—because the “damage,” or disruption, is also to your “software,” (sensory and motor nerves) the movement programs in your brain’s Motor Control Center. (Your “Motor Control Center” is simply the part of your brain that coordinates all your body’s movements, as well as your alignment and balance). When you injure a muscle, it gets reflexively “shut down” to protect it from further harm and your brain begins to adapt your movements to avoid overusing that muscle. This is the beginning of a distorted movement program. And distorted movement programs are like bad habits. Once you develop one, they can be very hard to “break out of.” One consequence is that you lose full conscious control of your injured muscle (you don’t have your full strength or flexibility). This is seen a lot amongst back pain sufferers who have lost control of there main stabilisers or those with anterior knee pain where the muscle imbalance caused by compensation causes a mal-tracking of the knee cap. Unless the distorted movement programs in your brain (the “software glitches”) are corrected too, any progress gained by treating your muscles alone will often continue to be temporary or incomplete. The Solution By treating these principles, not only can stubborn, difficult-to-heal injuries and pain patterns finally be laid to rest, but the underlying "neuromuscular imbalances" that allow many of these problems to occur in the first place can be corrected as well. And as an athlete or highly active person, this means you can look forward to:
To sum up, lasting recovery from muscular injury is in:
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