Advanced Massage Therapy Techniques

Active Release Massage Therapy or more commonly known as Active Release Therapy (ART) is a technique in massage therapy wherein the problems or tightness felt in our tendons, muscles, ligaments, and nerves are treated effectively. This is usually the therapy of choice for those people who are suffering from repetitive-motion and soft tissue injuries like overuse of a muscle and other sports-related trauma and injuries.

Fact is our muscles do not work alone. Our muscles need its surrounding connective tissues to be functional and healthy for it to effectively work. Although ART is more common in athletes who mostly complain about aching muscles, numbness, and tingling, this could also be beneficial for all kinds of muscle problems such as back pain, CTS, shoulder pain, neck tightness, knee problems, and other injuries.

ART is a manual therapy done on certain soft tissue areas of the body. Soft tissue structures when placed with a damaging force can form scar tissue and adhesions in the body. This scar and adhesions may cause movement restrictions and impede blood flow that will damage the muscles over time. When a tissue is perceived to be damaged, treatment is done by sliding and stretching movements at the specific area that will increase the movement by breaking the adhesions.

For Active Release Therapy practitioners to find an injured area, they apply a hands-on pressure to examine the range of movement of a client. In this way, the practitioner will be able to locate tightness in a muscle by just feeling their tendons, filaments, and ligaments for any sign of breaks or tears. This technique focuses mostly on unusually related soft tissues in different areas. It involves moving a limb or other relevant body part as told by the practitioner as he or she supports your movement.

There are things, however, that one should need to know about Active Release Massage Therapy. To put it simply:

No pain, no gain. So they say. This is also true with Active Release Therapy. Just a precaution, it CAN hurt. When your muscles or tendons are injured and you try to put some pressure on it, pain is inevitable. Don't worry though because the pain is just temporary and lasts for a few seconds only.

When you are to try Active Release Therapy, you might want to look for someone who is actually trained on it. Not just "trained" trained, but someone who has an extensive experience on this therapy. You don't want to end up as someone's training dummy, don't you?

A series of intensive massage techniques are done by the therapist to enable the muscle to move to its full range. Through this, blood and lymph fluid is able to flow freely to the muscles with the relief of tissues surrounding the muscle of any scar that usually blocks the injured muscle. With blood and lymph fluids flowing freely, muscles heal. Active Release Therapy reduced the need for surgeries in patients that seemed to have no other choice.

For muscle thearapy, check out Chiropractors Toronto for more on Active Health Centre.