How A Massage Can Enhance Your Workout
Looking good is a pain sometimes, literally. You spend hours in the gym, jogging and slogging to get buns of steel and six pack abs but it comes at a price. Strenuous exercise puts your body under an enormous amount of stress and actually damages your muscles. The aftermath of today’s workout is often pain, stiffness and loss of flexibility tomorrow. A massage therapy session after your workout is the ideal way to enhance your body’s recovery and avoid the day after aches and pain.
The effects of exercise
A workout session puts stress on your muscles, tendons and bones and actually can damage your muscles and connective tissues. Tiny tears form in your muscles that allow them to grow larger as they heal after your workout. That healing is slowed down by the fact that your muscles are also tight after a workout session. You remember the tight, ache in your body and the fatigued, let-down feeling after a hard gym session in high school. It’s the same one you get the day after now if you don’t make recovery a priority.
Recovering from working to get buff is a vital and important part of a healthy exercise plan. Eating the right foods and supplementing your diet to replace the nutrients lost during exercise allows your body to recover faster. Adding a session of post workout massage therapy to your regimen provides definite benefits to enhance recovery.
Post workout massage:
- Loosens sore, tight muscles
- Improves circulation of vital body fluids
- Decreases stiffness and restores flexibility
- Relaxes muscle pressure on surrounding tissues
Proven Benefits
Massage therapy offers proven physical and psychological perks. Just ten minutes of massage after a workout causes beneficial changes at several levels. Muscles tight from exercise unlock and relax to promote faster recovery and healing starts to happen at the cellular level.
Researchers at Buck Institute on Aging and McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario discovered that massage therapy affects two genes inside your muscles to promote healing. Massage therapy activates genetic pathways to inhibit the proteins that cause inflammation. Reducing inflamed muscle tissues speeds up recovery. The research indicates that massage is as effective as NSAID drugs and better than ice baths that can slow down healing.
Mind/body energy boost
Massage therapy helps restore physical and mental energy after a hard workout. The cells inside your muscles get energy from mitochondria. These tiny power plants use oxygen and the nutrients derived from food to make the energy your muscles need to function. One of the reasons you feel so good after a massage is that it stimulates the biogenesis, the growth, of mitochondria.
Sometimes exercising your body seems to set your mind racing as well. You end your workout with your body energized and your brain buzzing with ideas. Massage works on both the mental and physical level to provide a healthy feeling of relaxed alertness. You feel good and your mind is focused for more creative thought.
Looking good and feeling great depends on a good workout followed by speedy recovery. Get the most out of your exercise regimen by enhancing post workout recovery. Have a snack to replace lost nutrients and visit Saw Mill Club’s licensed massage therapists after exercising.
