flexibility – Wellness Focus

Five Factors That Affect Your Flexibility

Some people can bend themselves into a pretzel, while others can barely get up after sitting for a while. How about you? Flexibility, or limberness, refers to how freely your joints move and the length in muscles that cross those joints. Regular massage can, and will, help most people improve and retain their normal flexibility. You’ll feel better because you can move better.

How flexible you are depends on factors, some of which are in your control, some that aren’t. Here are five factors that affect your flexibility: Continue reading “Five Factors That Affect Your Flexibility”

Massage for Weight Lifters

Millions of people use weight training as a way to improve coordination, increase muscle mass, speed metabolism, and improve strength. When proper form is used, weight training can be very effective in helping you look and feel better.

By definition, weight training increases the amount of effort your muscles exert and challenges your metabolism to keep up with the increased energy needed to sustain those efforts. During the process, muscles react different ways. Sometimes weight lifters experience soreness because of microtears in the muscle fibers, or feel sore from the buildup of lactic acid and other natural body chemicals in the stressed areas. Even when your form is perfect, all this exertion and stressing of muscles can cause aches and pains. That’s where massage can really help.

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Please, Tell Me About Knees!

Your knees are among the largest joints in your body and are under intense weight-bearing strain and used daily–no wonder they hurt sometimes.

The knee joint joins your thigh bone (femur) and your shin bone (tibia). The fibula bone runs alongside the tibia and, along with the kneecap (patella), make up the rest of the bones in the knee. Two c-shaped pieces of cartilage, the medial and lateral menisci, act as shock absorbers between femur and tibia.

The knee joint is the most complex in the body. It’s a “condylar” joint, meaning it has two protrusions on the femur (called condyles) and the the tibia has two grooves which enable them to roll and slide against each others. Because of it’s unique structure, it’s also a hinge joint.

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What is ANMT?

ANMT is an acronym for Advanced Neuromuscular Therapy. To learn ANMT, certified massage therapists complete an additional 450 hours of continuing education and learn to evaluate and differentiate between myofascial pain and disfunction, as opposed to injury, and to employe effective techniques to address these issues with great results.

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Therapeutic Massage is Different

Recent studies have added to the body of knowledge showing definite positive physiological and clinical changes related to properly performed, targeted therapeutic massage.

The term therapeutic massage is a general, nonspecific term referring to any type of massage, from superficial to deep, that may have a healing effect. Most massage therapists train in multiple techniques and therapies, but and there is high variability in the training programs and in what therapies practitioners choose to learn.

Techniques in a therapeutic massage vary according to need and may include massage from several modalities during the session, including effleurage, petrissage, friction, tapotement, fascial manipulation, structural integration, active release, Swedish, sports, shiatsu,deep tissue, myofascial release, and advanced neuromuscular therapy.

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Massage Can Improve Range of Motion

Your body is constructed around a bony skeleton composed of roughly 206 bones, which are jointed to one another. Skeletal muscles attach to two or more bones that are joined through one or more joints. Contraction of these muscles crossing their respective joints powers the movement of the bones, pivoting at their joints. Muscles tend to work in pairs, across joints, each muscle of the pair pulling opposite to its partner.

When muscles become tense due to stressors of any kind, both muscles of a pair partially contract and shorten, putting pressure across the joint(s) the muscles cross. This tension reduces the potential range of motion (ROM) at the joint(s), because part of the dynamic range of the muscles is already reached. Continue reading “Massage Can Improve Range of Motion”