Is the way you breathing causing your neck pain? – Part 1
If you have had a treatment with us, we may have talked to you about importance of deep breathing, if you have tension in your neck.
Shallow breathing, thoracic breathing, or chest breathing is the drawing of minimal breath into the lungs, usually by drawing air into the chest area using accessory muscles rather than throughout the lungs via the diaphragm. This means that you over use some of the accessory muscles of breathing, including the scalenes and sternocleidomastoid muscles both of which are located in the side of the neck. The scalenes elevate the 1st rib during inspiration and the sternocleidomastoid raises the sternum. Unfortunately, these accessory muscles aren’t built for routine respiration, and they exhaust and eventually injure themselves which may result in pain and/or a reduced range of movement (i.e. inability to turn your head fully from side to side).
People shallow breath when they are nervous, stressed, anxious, or when they concentrate. So simply stopping and taking one deep breath after you send each email, can reduce the over use of your scalenes and sternocleidomastoid.
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So massage is safe for pregnant women, but is it effective?
Last week we established that massage is safe for pregnant women. A scientific review of studies of pregnancy in massage fond that pregnant women who received massage had
- decreased depression
- decreased anxiety
- decreased leg and back pain
- reduced cortisol levels
- reduced excessive fetal activity
- lower rate of prematurity (a baby being born before its 37 weeks old)
- experienced less pain
- required less medication
- had shorter labours (on average 3 hours shorter)
The scientific evidence base for Sports & Deep Tissue Massage
I would like to write a series of blog articles on the scientific evidence for massage. I think it is important to start by stating the obvious that while massage can be studied, not many scientists are interested in studying it and not many massage therapists have scientific training. This means that massage is woefully under researched. In addition it is amazingly difficult to find 100 people with the same problem, who need exactly the same massage treatment, so large scale studies are very rare, which means a weakness of most studies is their size. Finally, while, most scientists are interested in how massage works, we don't have to know how something works to know if it works. I know most of my clients are interested in scientific evidence but equally important is anecdotal evidence, their own opinion and experience of the treatment. What it crystal clear from scientific data and widely agreed upon by massage therapist researchers is that massage
- Reduces anxiety
- Reduces depression
- Reduces stress
- Reduces high BP
