Take control of your health and well-being with massage

Five benefits of massage that help you take control of your health and well-being

1. Relieve Stress, improve mood, reduce headaches, ease chronic pain
Run from the tiger! Ok, so there’s good and bad stress and a certain amount helps us to get things done. We need to be able to react to situations and our sympathetic system kicks in when we have to act fast, and need energy to get a job done, or run away from a threat … like a tiger. The adrenaline and cortisol released during moments of stress boosts your heart rate and blood sugar, while diverting energy away from your digestion and immune responses. These reactions have helped humans to evolve and survive and in themselves are all good, if we only go hunting once a day!
The tiger is waiting! Trouble in the modern world, we subject ourselves to a constant barrage of perceived threats, with workloads that never get easier, deadlines to meet, bosses to please, no clear boundaries between work and home, bills to pay, and then nothing but bad news in the media. It feels like the tiger is always waiting outside, and this means our body stay ready in sustained ‘fight or flight’ stress and over time affects our mental and physical health with a range of problems. This includes changes in behaviour, negative mood, anxiety, lack of sleep, and results in physical symptoms such as headaches, back aches, upset stomach, elevated blood pressure, and all sorts of chronic pain issues. Constantly elevated levels of cortisol that occur when you are continually stressed, raise blood sugars and can contribute to the development of diabetes and heart disease. Constant stress ages you!
But, how about we get rid of the tiger, at least for a while! Massage triggers a range of responses that help manage stress, resulting in feelings of relaxation, reduced stress, mental alertness and improved mood. During a massage, your body increases its production of ‘feel-good’ endorphins, and chemicals, serotonin and dopamine. Massage also decreases the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, allowing your body to relax and allow the parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ system to help you recover. Regular massage improves your overall health by keeping these stress hormones at bay, reducing anxiety, encouraging a good night’s sleep and helping address issues such as high blood pressure, which in turn can lower risks of heart attack and stroke.

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2. Improved posture
‘Sitting is the new smoking’ – I expect you’ve heard this. Most of us spend too much time sitting these days. Add up how many hours a day you spend walking, running, doing yoga or whatever keeps you moving. Now how many hours you spend sitting. It’s also the way we sit – our posture. Hunching over lap-tops, especially now more people work from home. Driving a car, looking at your phone. The thing is our bodies are clever, too clever. If you want to sit in these positions, your body, more-so your fascia, helps you out. It tries to make your life easier. The fascial tissue thickens and adapts and becomes dehydrated and immobile. You try and correct your posture – and it feels wrong.
Massage helps by hydrating the tissues and allow them to glide and move how they are supposed to. It also relieves contracted areas in the muscles and tissues. By improving your range of movement, you can move into more natural posture. Regular massage, along with looking for ways to improve your sitting position and encouraging movement can help to decrease back and shoulder pain significantly

3. Improve breathing
When we are stressed and anxious our breathing reacts by becoming shallow and constricted. Because massage helps trigger your parasympathetic system this helps slow and deepen your breathing. Along with working on breathing exercises (something I often do) this helps to regulate our response to stress. Being able to find way to relax our breathing also helps with other responses to stress, such as feelings of chest tightness, shoulder pain, digestion issues and headaches.

4. Enhanced exercise performance and recovery
Muscle pain and stiffness is common when you start a new exercise or do a lot more than you’re used to. Exercise causes micro-tears in muscle fibres, leading to inflammation, which the body repairs and over time the body gets stronger. Massage reduces the production of cytokines which are pro-inflammatory – thereby reducing the duration and intensity of delayed onset muscle soreness. It also stimulates the mitochondria which convert glucose to energy- essential in the repair process
Massage also helps treat sports injuries and post-surgery, increasing fluid flow and hydrating tissues and decreasing adhesions and fibrotic tissue build up – so maintaining range of movement. Specifically, massage can be used to help scar tissue from surgery as well. Regular massage can be used by anybody who exercises regularly to improve performance, speed-up post-exercise recovery, improve soft tissue function, improve flexibility and range of movement and help prevent injury.

5. Boost immunity
If sustained for too long, stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, suppress our immune system, leaving our bodies more vulnerable to infection and making it more difficult for the body to recover. Massage offers relaxation and stress relief and research suggests that regular massage naturally increases the healthy immune system’s ability to kill certain cells, while decreasing the number of T-cells, which improves the body’s immune function overall.
Massage also relieves pain, which has been shown to suppress the immune system and increases susceptibility to infection.

So now that you know more about the benefits of massage and you can see how it can help you take control of your health and wellbeing, isn’t it time you booked your appointment?

Knees, ankles, feet and toes

Bridge to fitness word cloudI’ve just returned from a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting and weekend seminar learning about treatment of knee and foot dysfunction and the connection between the foot, knee, ankle and the hip.   

The course was delivered by Dr Evan Osar who is a chiropractor (all the way from Chicago) and expert in assessment and corrective exercise to stabilise how individuals move to solve chronic postural and movement dysfunction.

Over the weekend the seminar covered the functional anatomy of the knee and ankle-foot complex, how poor stabilisation and biomechanics can lead to degeneration in joints such as the knees and hips and other conditions such as plantar fasciitis. Also, how exercises commonly given to ‘improve’ stability are more likely to reinforce bad habits, thereby leading to further injury; if these are carried out incorrectly without making sure correct alignment, foot function and breathing are addressed first. Read More »

F is for Fascia

Since becoming a soft tissue therapist I’ve become more and more interested in fascia, its role in the body and what a therapist, can do to effect it.

Fascial release is a powerful treatment in restoring range of movement and you may like to know more about how  it can help you.

What is fascia and where is it?

Your superficial fascia lies just under your skin and contains dense connective tissue as well as fat. It provides shock absorption, space for accumulation of fluids and metabolites, stores fat and provides insulation.Read More »

More that just sports massage

What I love most about my job is how rewarding it is when I can share in the happiness of someone able to return to pain free running or other sport after treatment has helped them recovery from injury.  As a runner myself, when someone gets a PB or achieves their challenge because treatment and exercises have helped improve their strength, range of movement and allowed them to stay injury handsfree, I understand how much this means to them.

I am a BTEC Level 5 Soft Tissue Therapist*, trained at one of the UK’s most prestigious schools (LSSM) and also a UKA Running Coach. This combination helps me to understand how technique, training, stability and movement pattern impacts on the body. So as well as good hands-on treatment which works well, feels good and can produce instantly noticeable improvements, I can offer rehab, exercises and even training advice that really will help you get better. Like trying Read More »

Don’t let injury foil your fitness plans

New year, and many of us are planning some races, signing up for challenges, making promises to get fitter, keep fitter, do the strength Bridge to fitness word cloudwork and remember to stretch.  All of that is great! New year is a brilliant time to take stock of what your priorities are.  Life is often so busy, and distractions are many, that we often get fixated on the activity itself and end up  side lining important supplementary work and treatment, that we know will help us to achieve these goals.

As  a Soft Tissue Therapist, Running Coach and also a keen runner,  I know that making time for strength and stability work is a key ingredient in becoming a stronger, less injury prone runner, but I manage to find umpteen ‘distractions’ to put it off and not get round to it.  Equally I know the benefits of regular massage and soft tissue techniques, not just when injury strikes, but as a preventative treatment and to help recovery from training, but often struggle to ‘make time’ to go for treatment myself.

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Give your body a service

It’s that time of the year when you think about switching on the central heating, and remember that you need to get a service, to make sure that your heating doesn’t break down in the middle of the coldest spell, when you’re expecting it to work hardest.Bridge to fitness word cloud

Now think of the soft tissues in your body (muscles, connective tissue/fascia, tendons, and ligaments) in the same way.  If you work your body harder and put it under greater strain through exercise or your job, then eventually it could break down as a result of overuse and muscle imbalances. A regular ‘service’ could help prevent that happening!

Overuse injuries can occur from any repetitive activity which could be exercise or occupational actions. During exercise micro-tearing occurs in the muscle fibres and regeneration and remodelling takes place in response, which along with other physical adaptations in the blood vessels and connective tissues allows the body to get stronger. However as the microscopic wounds heal the scar tissue may not completely reabsorb and the tissue may be weaker and stiffer than previously. Subsequent training loads these muscles before they are fully healed and overuse injuries can develop slowly from repeated micro-trauma from overloading in a specific area of muscle.

Overuse can also occur in daily life in repetitive occupational activities such as driving, sitting behind a desk or using a mouse. It can be caused by poor postural habits where muscle imbalances cause overload of muscles.

Because the body is remarkable at adaptation it will lead to imbalances, with other muscles compensating and you can often remain blissfully unaware that there is ‘trouble brewing’ until you feel pain or sustain an injury at another site (which could be remote from the problem). The weakest link in the kinetic chain breaks down!

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What can kinesiology taping do for you?

This week I attended a kinesiology taping master class run by John Gibbons as part of his Body Master training courses.  I was really taping plantar fasciaitiskeen to learn more about the benefits of kinesiology taping application and how I could use it to help my clients with their injuries.

During the day we learnt about the history of kinesiology taping,  how it works and how to use and apply it. Most of the day was given to watching demonstrations and practicing application.  Kinesiology taping has become popular with athletes  (first evident in the 2012 Olympics) but its benefits can equally help those not involved in sport.  We learnt and practiced application of kinesiology tape to help relieve ankle sprains, plantar fasciitis, hamstring strains, piriformis pain, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel syndrome, shoulder pain, illiotibial band syndrome and a whole host of other painful conditions.  I am quite exciting to be adding this to the toolbox of treatments I can offer my clients.  Below are the answers to some of the questions you may have.

How does Kinesiology tape work?

Kinesiology tape has been clinically shown to help with the body’s response to inflammation. It decompresses the space Read More »

About me and Bridge 2 Fitness

Viv profileI’m a Soft Tissue Therapist, with a BTEC Level 5 Professional National Diploma, having trained with London School of Sports Massage (LSSM). I am also a member of the Institute of Sport and Remedial Massage. I offer treatment for muscular pain from sports injury or the stresses of everyday life by combining assessment, treatment which includes massage and a rehabilitation plan including stretching and strengthening to get you back to doing the things you want to do.  Soft tissue therapy can help you achieve your sporting challenges, cope with increasing training levels and recover quicker from training sessions and races.  I have treated many injuries and conditions including ankle sprains, achilles problems, ITB pain, plantar fasciitis, peroneal strain, knee pain, lower back problems, neck and shoulder pain, headaches, postural problems, sciatica and piriformis syndrome.

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