Massage Benefits

Do you understand the benefits of massage therapy? I'll show you how massage benefits you in four major ways:

• Better health and well being
• Less pain
• Treatment of soft-tissue injury
• Better posture and alignment

Better Health and Well Being

Better health and well being give you the ability to live your life to the fullest. You feel great and have the energy to meet life's challenges and pursue your interests. Massage benefits your health and well being in many ways:

Stress Relief

Massage reverses the effects of negative stress by bringing about the relaxation response, which includes reducing blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, and the level of stress hormones (such as adrenaline and cortisol) in the body. To understand why reversing the effects is stress is essential to your health, read about how stress affects your body.

Massage benefits your ability to monitor stress signals and respond appropriately by sensitizing you to your body and improving your body awareness.

Better Circulation

Massage benefits blood and lymph circulation. Good circulation is vital to good health. Your blood and lymph carry nourishment to millions of cells throughout your body and carry away the waste eliminated from the cells. Massage increases the flow of blood and lymph, encourages better exchange of nutrients at the cellular level, and promotes detoxification. This process is important because the "future you" is determined by how well your cells regenerate themselves.

Increased circulation also helps both prevent and relieve muscle tension—lack of circulation can lead to chronically tight muscles. In turn, chronically tight muscles impede circulation and do not receive enough nutrients.

Easier Movement with Less Risk of Injury

Massage relaxes tense muscles, enhances tissue elasticity and flexibility, and increases range of motion in joints. This makes it easier for you to move and pursue all the activities that you want to pursue. And you are less likely to injure yourself because a less tense and more flexible body is better able to handle any movement you make, even the sudden, unexpected ones.

And More Healthy Massage Benefits

• Massage strengthens your immune system.
• Massage improves sleep patterns. Sleep deprivation is a major problem and the cause of many accidents.
• Massage promotes deeper and easier breathing. Shallow breathing means your body is not receiving the optimal amount of oxygen, which causes your health to deteriorate.
• Massage reduces anxiety and mental stress, creates a calmer mind, increases feelings of well-being, and relaxes you. All these massage benefits increase your capacity for clear thinking.
• Massage speeds recovery from exercise by helping remove waste products from muscles. Read more about sports massage benefits.

Less Pain

Another massage benefit is relief of muscle aches and pains. Aches and pains adversely affect your health and drain away energy that you could be using to pursue other activities.

Read more about how massage therapy can help relieve chronic pain.

Treatment of Soft Tissue Injury

Soft-tissue injuries (such as muscle pulls and strains, tendonitis, ligament sprains, and whiplash) heal faster with specifically targeted massage. Read more about massage for injury.

Better Posture and Alignment

Your body works best when it is aligned properly. Better alignment means you move easier and are less likely to experience pain and injury.

In part, proper alignment means that your shoulders are level, your hips are level, your knees are directly over your ankles, and your feet point straight forward. Poor alignment stresses your body. For example, if one hip is forward of the other, it creates torque in your body that stresses muscles and wears away cartilage in joints.

The most important thing to remember about alignment is that bones do what muscles tell them to do. The key to restoring alignment is relaxing tight muscles and strengthening weak ones. A series of weekly, specifically targeted massage sessions can help restore good alignment. Just be sure you find a massage therapist who works specifically on alignment, because many do not.

A common form of misalignment is a forward tilting pelvis (that is, your hips are rolled forward).

"Forward pelvic tilt is the source of much of the minor low back pain that many of us take for granted as we get into our thirties and forties. By increasing the arch of the spine, this dysfunction is like a hairline crack in the wall of a dam. The overall structure is weakened. In time the crack gets wider. The constant flexion of the spine, beyond its normal range, is putting wear and tear on the vertebral disks."*

Another common misalignment is everted feet. That is, your toes point outward when you stand or walk.

"The situation is the rough equivalent of having two flat tires. The big gait muscles of the leg have stopped working. The feet evert because the gait muscles have become lazy and transferred the walking function to the hip flexor muscles."*

Note: Telling yourself to stand up straight does not work for two reasons. First, many people’s concept of straight is NOT good alignment. Second, when you stop thinking "stand up straight" your body goes back to its programmed position. You must change this programming. The best way to change it is using a combination of massage (or other bodywork) and alignment exercises, such as those in the following books:

*Quotes from Peter Egoscue's The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion and Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain. Highly recommended if you are serious about getting rid of pain.

Read about research that supports the benefits of massage therapy.