Massage Therapy Can Keep You in the Game
When you think of spring training, images of brawny major leaguers in sunny locales like Vero Beach, Florida or our own Rockies in Tucson, Arizona come quickly to mind. But while they may be perfecting their swings, refining their sliders and working off the winter's excesses, they are doing something equally as important and easily overlooked. They are slowly ramping up their bodies for the long summer ahead.
Although your summer may not involve daily batting practice or pop flies to center field, the return to fair- weather chores and activities can be equally hazardous to your body, if not more so. The more mundane activities like tending the lawn, building a fence, turning over the garden and the myriad of other tasks and chores we jump into with the best of intentions that can be just as strenuous often result in injury. "The most common way that people get injured is the trauma associated with the weekend warrior," says Sheltering Arms Physical Therapist Steve Swinson.
Different sports and activities carry with them different potential injuries. Foot and ankle sprains, for example, are common with running, back pain with golf, shoulder pain with swimming. And anyone who has spent time on their hands and knees pulling weeds and spading the earth to prepare an abundant garden knows that recurring wrist, neck, elbow and shoulder pain can make the job far less enjoyable than it ought to be.
Dealing with springtime injuries doesn't have to mean sitting out for the rest of the season. I have treated plenty of strained backs, arms and legs from people who take on the two-mile jog or over do it in the yard after a winter of physical dormancy. But the real danger, lies not in doing too much but in not seeking relief and treatment when you find yourself injured from strenuous activities. Pain and injury left untreated is going to really affect your ability to get around. The body’s muscles splinter to protect followed with guarding and overcompensating throwing the body out of balance. The sooner those holding patterns are broken and balance is restored to the body the sooner you are back in the game.
A 90 minute integrative therapy session will combine Sports Massage Therapy techniques as well as other integrative therapies to address your weekend warrior needs:
- Deep tissue/trigger point therapy
- Positional releasing
- Reciprocal inhibition
- PNF stretching
- CranialSacral/Polarity Therapy
- Myofascial Release
Depending on the severity, injury resolution can be as brief as a week or as long as a year. But normal healing time for most pulled muscles and sprains, which are the normal weekend warrior injuries, usually take about two to six weeks.
