Should a sports massage be painful?

Should a sports massage be painful? 

This is a widely discussed topic, and often it’s not really discussed properly or in a relevant way to your needs. 

 

When the goal of the treatment is to provide some release in muscle tension that seems to be causing a restriction in certain movements, then the desired outcome is unlikely to happen if there isn’t a little bit of discomfort experienced during the treatment. It should be considered that the aim of the sports massage treatment is to help people move better and feel better, not feel worse as a result of their treatment, or for the therapist to see how high they can take the pain levels to! 

Over the years many times a client has said to me “If I can’t feel anything during the treatment, then it can’t be doing much good” which is not strictly true, but I feel that there is a disconnect sometimes between how people perceive value in a manual therapy treatment, and what actually is of value in a therapeutic sense. 

It could be partly psychological-I’ve spent a lot of time over nearly 2 decades doing this type of work, and sometimes the very act of being present and working on someone’s aches and pains is as much about fulfilling a psychological need as much as it is a physical one, and it’s not unusual to observe, with experience, that sometimes chronic long term aches and pains, can often occur in parallel to episodes of prolonged stress, be it emotional or physical. It’s difficult to quantify this in a clinical sense because what one person finds stressful, another may not, but there is a pattern there that I’ve noticed over time. 

In terms of the intensity or discomfort that may be felt during a sports massage treatment, this will also vary considerably between the lower body ( legs and hips) and the muscles of the lower and upper back. I always spend a bit less time working on the large muscles of the legs simply because it can be much more uncomfortable for the client, but if it’s a session where I’m doing legs and upper body, I’ll always work on the legs initially to get the more uncomfortable bit done first, so that when I focus on the back muscles, it’s still quite an intense therapeutic treatment, but you can adjust to it and relax more into it, which can also be calming on the nervous system. 

I would add though, that simply making a sports massage some kind of pain endurance test is not what it should be about, and any discomfort felt should only be as a result of testing the boundaries of soft tissue suppleness and range of movement. I’ve seen videos online of people shouting and screaming during a sports massage treatment, and I would say that sometimes people have said to me that my work is very intense (it sometimes is) my aim is to achieve better movement and wellbeing whilst keeping discomfort to a minimum, and any aspects to my treatment that are quite intense, will be followed by a more comfortable and less intense phase, to give you chance to breathe into it and relax better.