Many of the students who graduate from Kinesiology or Sports Medicine programs will tell you there is a place for massage in their field.  Today’s sports medicine industry has brought the best available new science to helping athletes heal, but some time-tested methods still pertain to new and improved techniques.

Massage is one of them: although in the general population, massage has fallen out of the mainstream (with pharmaceutical options taking over for some conditions), in athletic medicine, it’s still going strong.

Some experts have concluded that massage is effective in several ways for the times when muscles are under the weather: besides helping the body to deal with lactic acid buildups (many of us have felt this at some time or another while massaging sore limbs), massage, according to sports medicine gurus, can also help muscles feel better by getting them more oxygenated and more limber.

Massage can also help in making stiff, possibly inflamed or overbuilt muscles more flexible.  This is a must for body builders who are feeling their bulk become too “brittle” as a result of overly rapid building.

After an injury, massage can do wonders as well, partly by making sure that tissues damaged in an industry don’t “fuse” incorrectly or grow in ways that were caused by event-driven damage.  Some coaches also claim that massage can drive the confidence of the player to recover, almost as a “placebo”, but also as a source of comfort, both physical and psychological.

And, when it comes to the day to day of getting out there and competing, lots of athletes swear by massage therapy as a continual balm for reducing event anxiety and helping the body to face all of the various pressures that it might encounter in a game of tennis, soccer, football, baseball, or any other sport that often brings unprecedented challenge to an athlete.

With all of this in mind, there’s no reason why athletes should be the only ones able to benefit from the time tested methodology of lymphatic, deep tissue or other massage techniques that can have a serious effect on certain kinds of health conditions.  With all of the research that exists on massage and its uses, the public could take some cues from the sports medicine field when it comes to massage.  If a tissue massage can do all of this for athletes, why not for regular sufferers of general muscle and joint conditions?  As massage catches on in the wider medical community, insurance companies have begun modest efforts to cover it as a therapeutic care with proven results.

So, whether you’re an athlete with an injury or a patient presenting at a family practice, ask your doctor about various types of massage therapy that can mean the difference between whole or partial healing.

Justin Stoltz, Fitness Future Correspondent