If you’ve got a headache, it could be coming from your shoulders.
Muscles make up, on average, between 36-42% of your body weight. With that much mass, they have a significant impact on your health. When all is in working order, muscles allow you to perform normal activities with ease. When your muscles experience trigger points (also known as “muscle knots”), you can experience pain, stiffness, tension, a loss in your range of motion and sometimes severe limitations of your normal function.
Trigger points are an extremely common cause of pain. There are more than 600 potential trigger points possible in human muscles. Light pressure to active trigger points reproduces the pain and gives the therapist a clue as to where to look for the cause. Trigger points have a special property called referred pain. Referred pain means that a trigger point in one muscle can actually create pain in another area.
For example, when the muscle at the top of your shoulder (trapezius) has a trigger point it often refers pain up the side of your neck and head causing a headache. Active trigger points in the muscles of the shoulder, neck and face are a common source of headaches. In many instances the headache has the features of a “tension” headache, when actually the trigger points can initiate classical migraine headaches or be part of a mixed tension/migraine headache complex.
Trigger point therapy is a special technique that should be performed only by specially trained massage therapists. Because the results of manual therapy are directly related to the skill level of the therapist, we’re careful to make sure our therapists have the highest level of training and can do safe, effective work every time.
Trigger point therapy sessions are available by appointment and a 60 minute session costs just a few dollars more than a standard massage session.
