How massage can benefit you
As a massage therapist you would expect me to be a big advocate of touch therapies. We often think of the benefits of touch therapies like massage in terms of our physical health but they also impact out mental wellbeing too. So l wanted to share with you the details of a new report that has found that introducing touch therapies withing the NHS could potentially reduce mental health problems by 10%, potentially reducing sick days by 1.76 million.
The report also concluded that touch therapies including massage can help you manage
- back pain
- neck & shoulder pain
- osteoarthritis
- cancer symptoms and treatment side effects
- fibromyalgia
- HIV/AIDS
- premature infant care
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Do you know how to protect yourself from a leading cause of disability?
The injury to a brian caused by stroke can lead to problems with talking, seeing, thinking, remembering, moving, eating, swallowing and more. It's no wonder stroke is a leading cause of disability in adults worldwide. Here are some lifestyle tips to cut the risk of suffering a stroke:
- Eat at least 3 to 5 services of fruit and vegatables a day - the more the better.
- Exercise most days of the week. Brisk walking for an hour a day five days a week can cut the risk of a stroke in half.
- Maintain a health weight, and especially watch out for abdominal fat.
- Limit alchol to no more than two drinks per day if you drink.
- Eat more grains such as oats, quinoa and brown rice.
- Eat more sources of good fats such as fatty fish, walnuts, flaxseed and chia seeds.
- Destress - psychological stress is a known risk factor for stroke.
How does NMT work?
I previously explain what NMT or Neuromuscular Technique is. In this blog post I want to focus on how NMT works. With NMT when the static pressure is applied to the muscle, a message is sent from the muscles (via the golgi tendons & the muscles spindles both of which are part of the nervous system) to the brain and then the muscle relaxes. Within the muscles
- Golgi tendons respond to load or force on the muscle
- Muscle spindles respond to the length of the muscle
More oops I did it again ….
We all wonder why after an injury or issue has healed and after several weeks of feeling pretty good, bang it flares up again, why? Last week I explained so factors influencing why this happens, now I want to explore the physiological aspects. The Physiological Law of Facilitation (the path of least resistance) The law explains why old injuries flare up under stress.
When an impulse has passed once through a certain set of neurons in your brain to the exclusion of others, it will tend to take the same course on a future occasion, and each time it does, the resistance will become less.
An analogy of this would be the image of rain on a dirt hill each time it rains the pathway becomes more entrenched, larger, and more intricate spreading out to nearby pathways. So once a nerve learns a pain pattern it tends to repeat it even in the absence of the injury. So the effects of stress to your mind and body can be a trigger for this response to kick in.
But wait, there is good news!
The Law of Facilitation can be maneuvered to help a massage therapist make the benefits of their treatment last longer. You may be wandering how can this be? In massage, patterns of imbalance which result from trauma, or from habitually stressful patterns like poor posture can be addressed. So your body should adapt to changes taking place in the musculoskeletal system and create new pathways.
The body likes sameness, which produces habitual patterns. When a pattern is established, it does not take as much stimulation to activate the response.
