Where Massage Fits Into Training

Working with athletes is different because when you train hard, soreness is a normal consequence of asking your body to do difficult things. As soon as you tell me what you do, I visualize your body doing it. Tell me you run and I’m picturing your stride. Tell me you golf and I’m thinking about the rotation through your hips and trunk. Swimming, cycling, lifting, tennis, climbing, throwing… they all ask the body to produce and control movement differently. That gives me somewhere to start before I ever put my hands on you.

Athletes tend to know their bodies pretty well and you know the difference between the familiar soreness you get after a hard leg day and the weird pull in your hamstring that wasn’t there last week. I want to hear about all of that because sometimes what you tell me changes what I was planning to do entirely. I can feel what’s happening on the table, but I can’t feel what happens when you hit mile eight, swing a bat or get underneath a bar. That information matters.

Should you get a massage before an event? Yes. And after too. We just need to have clear communication regarding what you’re about to ask your body to do. If you’re in between games, in an off-season, or have plenty of recovery time built into your schedule, we have more room to work on areas that may need attention. Close to competition, I’m much more interested in how you feel when you leave the table and how your body is going to respond over the next day or two.

I love massage as part of an athlete’s routine. But. It doesn’t replace good programming. It doesn’t replace sleep. It doesn’t replace proper nutrition and hydration. It doesn’t fix poor lifting mechanics. And it definitely doesn’t make an injury disappear. There are times when your symptoms belong in a physical therapist’s or doctor’s office instead of mine and I’m not too proud to refer. What massage does give us is another way to work with your body while you’re asking a lot from it. What I do is only part of the whole and I want our work to make sense alongside everything else you’re doing. Not become one more thing your body has to recover from.