Perhaps you might have enjoyed a massage in the past. While relaxing massages are enjoyable...neuromuscular or NMT is just one of the massage techniques address pain. You must understand that your nervous system controls everything in your body, including muscle tension and threshold of pain.
Whereas a "run of the mill" relaxation type of massage will work on the general areas of your back....NMT is a deep tissue massage that is applied directly to individual specific muscles, ligaments, connective tissue & tendons that are often missed in a "run of the mill" relaxation type of massage.
The client will sit in a chair specifically designed for neuromuscular massage therapy . The therapist will be using their thumbs, finger tips and even the elbows to explore every fiber tissue looking for bands of muscle fibers that are tighter than the rest of them. These cause problems such as hyper tonicity and ischemia. Hyper tonicity is simply a fancy word for an excess tension in your body’s muscles. Isechemia is simply another word for a restriction of your bodies blood flow in that area.
These areas will be treated until they "release". NMT will increase blood flow, diminish their pain and actually release pressure on nerves caused by previous soft tissue and muscle injuries.
People often wonder why a neuromuscular massage therapist will be working on one area when it hurts them somewhere else. The reason is Neuromuscular massage helps to release trigger points and intense knots of tense muscle that release pain in other areas of the body that are associated by the same muscle. This is known as "Referred Pain". For example: Relieving a tense trigger point in your back...could help ease pain in your shoulder or even eliminate headaches.
What Does This Have To Say About Your Massage Therapist?
This means that your NMT therapist is required to be educated in the following disciplines:
1) The physiology of your nervous system
2) Its effect on the muscular and skeletal systems.
3) They are educated in field of kinesiology
4) They are educated in the actual biomechanics of the body
5) They are educated in how to work in a clinical or medical environment
What Are The Benefits Of Neuromuscular Massage?
Neuromuscular Therapy will be used to address each of the five areas that cause pain in every one of us:
Ischemia: We talked a little about this one already. Isechemia is simply a lack of blood supply to soft tissues, which results in hypersensitivity to touch.
Trigger Points: These are basically highly irritated points in your muscles which refer pain to other parts of the body. Remember how we spoke about how releasing a trigger point in your left shoulder could release or stop those terrible headaches? The two at first may seem unrelated-- but in fact or connected together by muscle.
Nerve Compression : This is simply pressure on a nerve caused by any of the following:
* Soft tissue
* Bone
* Cartilage
Postural Distortion: This is an imbalance of the muscular system resulting from the movement of the body off the longitudinal and horizontal planes. How can I explain this...Do you know how your car needs an alignments after hitting a few potholes? Our bodies need a similar muscular alignment after being racked by stress or trauma!
Biomechanical Dysfunction: This simply refers to how we can hurt ourselves by incorrectly assuming the wrong posture over and over again during everyday activities such as :
* Poor lifting habits
* Terrible golf swing
* Lousy tennis stroke
* Incorrect typing posture
If you are living with constant pain and think that you may benefit from neuromuscular massage therapy, give your local therapist a call and ask if they specialize in this form of massage therapy. Talk to them about your current situation. If you are a good candidate for this form of massage, why not give it a try? You deserve to live your life pain free.
Greg Sawyer is an Atlanta Massage Therapist for over 12 years now
Learn more about Atlanta neuromuscular massage at his website.
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