HOW YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR SPORTS PERFORMANCE FAST
Written by Arran Tomlinson, Sports Massage Therapist at Muscle Mender, Buckshaw Village, Chorley
I'm a fully qualified Personal Trainer, as well as a Sports Massage Therapist, and I've seen so many people who want to improve their sports performance, but aren't sure what to do.
There are lots of supplements that say they can help boost your performance, but often the science behind the claims are dubious. Supplements like creatine have a lot of good press, but there can be side effects for some people, and the gains hoped for are often not quite what is achieved.
Other supplements - even if they are legal - break rules about doping during competitions. This isn't a huge concern for the weekend warrior who likes doing some CrossFit at the gym, but if you're looking to move into higher level sports, performance enhancing supplements can end up with being banned for doping.
SPORTS MASSAGE AT MUSCLE MENDER CAN HELP IMPROVE SPORTS PERFORMANCE
Quite simply, sports massage has been shown over decades to help reduce pain, improve wellbeing and decrease stress. This matters, because pain can stop you from training, and stress can negatively affect both performance and recovery.
There's research to show that sports massage can help reduce the severity of DOMS - the bane of many competitive athletes' lives, and help hasten recovery from lots of other conditions, too.
You can see a list of well known scientific studies that show the links between improved performance and sports massage here.
Sports Massage is the name given to a variety of specialist techniques that are used together to help get you back to your best performance. Techniques like effleurage, tappoment, petrissage, stretching, trigger point release, STRs....when used by a fully trained sports massage therapist like me, can really be wonderful.
But at Muscle Mender it's not just about massage. I also use cupping, scraping (also known as Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilisation or IASTM) and kinesiology (or sports) taping to get the very best results for you, whatever the problem holding you back.
As a fully trained Personal Trainer, and regular gym goer, I can understand your frustrations when injured and your desire to get back to sport, or improve your performance, so you can be sure I'll be working to get you to where you want to be as fast as possible!