If you're a serious athlete--either one who's competing with yourself and testing your personal limits, or one who's competing for a team at any level--the question isn't whether you'll be injured but when. Once you're injured, you can opt to go it alone or get help in your recovery. If you're smart, you'll use sports massage to speed your healing, and you'll incorporate massage into your training regimen. You may even decide to take sports massage courses or to become a massage therapist. Here's why:
Training Means Stretching Your Limits
Body awareness guru Thérèse Bertherat insists that your body is the house that you and you alone occupy, yet it's a house to which you've lost the key. The metaphor is striking, especially when you're an athlete who prides yourself on knowing your body. If you've done any serious training, though, you'll have to admit that you sometimes learned your body's boundaries by crossing them. You got injured, you recovered from your injuries, and then, hopefully, you trained more consciously.
Like television's six million dollar man, injured athletes hope for the best: to rebuild themselves better than they were before. To come back "better . . . stronger . . . faster," as the voice from that program so famously intoned. In fact, with the help of sports massage, the recovering body experiences optimum healing, and the recovered body can be stronger than before the injury.
Benefits of Sports Massage
According to sportsinjuryclinic.net, sports massage can heal both your body and your mind. Massage "helps remove waste products such as lactic acid and encourage the muscles to take up oxygen and nutrients which help them recover quicker." If you've achieved the "hard body" so esteemed in athletic culture, you haven't done yourself any favor, since your inelastic tissues may actually block your athletic growth. Again, sports massage can stretch the tissue and restore circulation, reinvigorating your training.
Those of you who've been injured training for an important event know how injury can impact your mental toughness. The "What ifs" cloud your training once you've had a sports injury before a critical event. Sports massage interrupts the cycle of anxiety that dogs post-recovery training. Massage restores confidence, as it aids physical recovery.
Rewriting Your Body's History
If you've had an injury in the past and you didn't have massage therapy at the time, your body changed structurally to accommodate and protect the injured area. Consequently, you still carry that injury with you as scar tissue or as patterns of inflexibility where the connective tissue or fascia have shortened and literally stuck together. Structural reintegration or deep tissue work--Rolfing, Hellerwork--can correct these longstanding body imbalances by lengthening the connective tissue holding onto these ancient rigidities.
Deep tissue work breaks down scar tissues and returns mobility to the fascia (myofascia, hence myotherapy), releasing old injuries and releasing long-carried physical trauma. Thus, structural reintegration is a powerful physical and emotional experience for practitioner and client alike. And psychically as well, if you're sensitive to such things. In my case, though I was a marathon runner and had run marathon distance a dozen times, my injuries finally happened at the site of my decades-old tailbone injury. Rolfing helped me heal.
An Hour of Prevention Worth Months of Cure
Once you've recovered your vigor, you'll see sports massage as essential to your optimum performance and overall health. Maintenance sports massage prevents injuries by keeping you mobile while making sure that the small kinks and compensations don't set in. Maintenance massage enhances training, reduces pre-event jitters, and aids post-event recovery. While my personal preference runs to deep tissue work, you can get sports massage therapy from many branches of massage. Swedish massage emphasizes muscle-work. Trigger point massage uses accupressure-style therapy to reduce spasm and release stiffness in connective tissue. Lymphatic massage encourages the body's removal of edema and reduces swelling. If you routinely include massage in your athletic regimen, regardless of the form of sports massage you choose, you'll see a boost in your performance, and perhaps extend the overall life of your athletic career.
Though I don't play tennis, I do get a tennis-elbow-like injury from too many hours at the laptop. My Rolfer can rid me of that excruciating elbow pain and inability to twist my forearm with a few deft moves. I've been through the sequences of both Rolfing and Hellerwork and remain amazed at the power of structural reintegration to make striking changes in a single session. However, you don't need the power of Rolfing to nip injuries in the bud. Ongoing sports massage can keep you on the field and off the sidelines.
Sports Massage Training
Unlike spa-style massage more generally, therapeutic massage--and the sub-field of sports massage--include those forms of massage geared for health management and rehabilitation. Massage therapists must be able to diagnose and treat muscle, soft tissue, and joint disorders. Many, many programs offer training in professional therapeutic massage, leading to diplomas, A.S. degrees or, more rarely, a bachelor's degree. Specialized forms of massage, like Rolfing, have their own training institutes.
Many massage schools include sports massage classes within their more generic massage degree programs. In fact, it's hard to find a massage therapy program that doesn't have at least one unit on sports massage. Today, however, it's possible to get a degree or 200-hour advanced certificate in Orthopedic and Sports Massage. The latter covers topics like inflammation and soft tissue trauma, neurovascular compression syndromes, and upper and lower extremity injuries-- topics essential to athletics and sports massage.
Sports Massage Certification
A variety of educational venues offer sports massage "certification." Some certifications can be obtained upon the completion of two weekend seminars. Such programs acquaint you with the basic upper body and lower body sports injuries commonly found in athletes. Others programs require 80 hours of instruction, while some require serious long-term, in-depth study. As with other forms of education, your payoff will equal your investment.
National certification in massage is something very different than academic or educational certification. Thirty states and the District of Columbia now license professional massage therapists, and the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork offers a certification exam to massage therapists who have completed at least 600 hours of classroom instruction in massage. Wholehealthmd.com suggests that a sports massage therapist should aim for NCTBMB certification and have at least 50 additional hours of training in sports massage.
Massage as a Profession
Should you decide to become a sports massage professional, you'll have lots of choices of working conditions. You might work in a medical clinic or chiropractic office. You might work for an athlete or for a team at the professional or college level. You might work at a massage center--or just go into private practice. Since working circumstances in the sports massage field are so varied, it's nearly impossible to say what your salary could be once you complete your sports massage courses and gain some experience.
Reputation seems key, as massage careers rest on clientele and referrals. How much you make is based on your skill and your ability to market that skill to the public. A beginning sports masseuse might charge $25 or $30 for a half-hour treatment. My Rolfer, an expert with 20 plus years of experience whom you'd wait months to see, charges $140 for a 90-minute session. Sports massage specialists who work for teams draw a salary; those allied with clinics usually get paid by the patient and give a certain percentage to the health care facility that houses them.
Whether you go the distance and get your massage certification, or whether you become a consumer of sports massage, my personal advice is that you find the practitioner who's right for you. I don't just see my Rolfer in his office; I connect with him in dreams. Why? For many of us, sports massage--like sport itself--is a deeply spiritual experience.
by Wendy Croix
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