Sports Massage Therapy Techniques

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 stretching techniques like PNF, or proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation, which help warm up the muscles and prevent injury during a game or performance. Our massage therapist will demonstrate full body sports massage methods you can use to prepare for your next sports match.

Video Transcript

"Hi! On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Jean Hurley from Siegels Day Spa in Cottonwood, Arizona, and we’re going to talk about sports massage today. There are 2 ways to look at sports massage; either the stretching and the preparation for a certain event and then the recuperative massage after an even where you can possibly even be dealing with some injury to muscle group. Kirk Tyler is going to be our massage recipient today, and we’re going to ask him to go and get undressed so we can start our evaluation. Alright, I use a technique called PNF, proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation. Basically, that engages the client with you in order to help certain stretches happen, and it helps to strengthen and lengthen the muscles during each massage technique. "