Basic Introduction to Giving a Sports Massage

Series Summary

Massage therapy is a practice with a multiplicity of benefits. Whether it’s a quick rubdown or a full-body treatment, the human touch has practical applications for promoting both physical and emotional well-being. The basic idea behind massage is the use of motion, pressure, tension, and vibration on certain areas of the body, localized around muscles or joints in pain or under stress. This allows a release of tension and a return to a homeostatic condition. Therefore, massage is very important for general stress relief, pain management, preventing muscle injury, encouraging physical and emotional healing, or improving circulation.

Sports massage is a particular branch of massage that focuses on relieving skeleto-muscular tension and returning the muscles to a loose, relaxed state. Sports massage techniques provide a number of important benefits to athletes. Since they regularly train their muscles hard for peak performance, and then go out a push their bodies to the limit and beyond, they are prone to constant and chronic injuries. Sports massage helps to prevent some of those injuries, as well as speed up recovery time and relieve extreme muscle cramping and tension.

In this free video guide to sports massage, learn techniques to use for the upper and lower back, the shoulders, and the arms. Our massage therapist will walk you through step-by-step and give tips on how to use your forearms and elbows, as well as your hands, to relieve muscle tension and stress.

Video Transcript

"Hello! This is Cherie Krieger on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we are going to demonstrate techniques on how to do sports massage for the back, lower back, the upper back and the arms. We are going to demonstrate friction and warming the muscles in the areas that we are going to work on We are going to demonstrate cross-fiber and pulling the muscles apart so we can get in there more deeply and we are gong to show techniques on using the forearm and the closed hands and fists, like this. All these techniques are available to you and they help save your hands from doing too much work and generating carpal tunnel. In demonstrating sports massage as with all massages, one of the good effects of a massage is to help flush out toxins in the body. So you need to advise your client to make sure and drink plenty of water afterwards. When we go into it we are going to start by applying the lotion to the areas that we are going to be working on which is going to be the back and then we will show the techniques of getting started with a sports massage. "