Displaying items by tag: pain management
What You Can Expect From A Deep Tissue Massage In Denver
Chronic pain is one of the most common health problems in the US. It can be very difficult to get through the day and live your life to the fullest when you experience recurring pain. Painkillers and alternative therapies can help you circumvent your chronic pain. Those approaches fail to treat the source of your pain. Deep tissue massage is one of the best ways you can effectively treat and alleviate your chronic pain. As a leading provider of deep tissue massage in Denver, let’s discuss what you can expect from this effective treatment method.
What To Expect From A Deep Tissue Massage In Denver
A deep tissue massage is no walk in the park. Other massage therapy techniques, like Swedish massage, may use a light approach to encourage relaxation and reduce muscle tension. Deep tissue massage, however, uses deeper and more intense pressure to treat chronic muscular pain. Let’s examine the unique approach, process, and benefits of a deep tissue massage in Denver.
The Deep Tissue Massage Process
A deep tissue massage will usually start out with some light massage techniques. These lighter strokes prepare your superficial muscles for a deeper intensity. It’s basically a short warm-up period to get your muscles loose, your blood flowing, and to relax your mind.
Your massage therapist will slowly begin to increase the pressure of their strokes. As the pressure builds, your massage therapist will begin to go slower and deeper. At this point, your massage therapist is beginning to target those deeper layers of muscle with more pressure in a targeted approach.
These deeper strokes aim to manipulate your connective tissues, which are the deepest tissue layers of your muscles. The slow and deep strokes slowly wear down adhesions on your connective tissue and start to break down any scar tissue. This process aims to “strip down” your muscles to ultimately treat your chronic pain and help realign your muscles, as well. As the massage continues, the problem areas of your connective tissue will start to break down and your healing process will be spurred.
Throughout your deep tissue massage in Denver, your massage therapist will mainly use their hands to apply pressure. To appropriately treat your chronic pain, your massage therapist may use their elbows and forearms to achieve the right intensity. In more intense cases, a t-bar massage tool may be used to leverage the right amount of pressure in a more targeted manner.
What Does A Deep Tissue Massage In Denver Feel Like
Fair warning: your deep tissue massage won’t feel like any massage you’ve experienced before. Afterwards, you’ll ultimately feel far better and have less pain than before. You should prepare to feel some slight discomfort during your deep tissue massage in Denver.
The highly focused pressure of a deep tissue massage can make you experience a little bit of pain. Many patients have described this sensation as a "good pain” - basically, a pain that feels good simultaneously. You may experience that sort of pain throughout the massage, but it won’t last the entire time. That pain should be gone by the end of your session.
It’s worth noting that clear communication is very important for deep tissue massage. Throughout your session, you need to talk consistently with your massage therapist. You definitely don’t want your massage to be uncomfortable or too painful. When the massage passes your pain threshold, tell your massage therapist! They’ll adjust their technique immediately so that you still get the most out of your massage without having too much pain.
Once your deep tissue massage is over, you should expect some slight muscle stiffness or soreness. These sensations are entirely natural and should be gone within a day or two. Try to drink a lot of fluids following your massage. Those fluids can help flush out the metabolic toxins that were released during your massage. When you’re properly hydrated and free of toxins, you greatly expedite your recovery.
The Benefits of Deep Tissue Massage
There are tons of different massage therapy techniques, all of which have their own purpose and health benefits. A deep tissue massage in Denver can greatly improve your health in a number of key ways. Of course, deep tissue massage has been proven to significantly reduce chronic pain. The health benefits don’t end there. Deep tissue massage can also:
Improve muscle stiffness.
Lower high blood pressure and improve heart health.
Reduce stress levels.
Streamline recovery from sports-related injuries.
And more!
The healing process can take a long time. Your recurring pain may not be fully treated or alleviated within just one session of deep tissue massage in Denver. As time goes on, those pains will start to fade into memory. With occasional deep tissue massages and daily proper stretches, you’ll be on track to leading a happier and healthier life.
Book Your First Deep Tissue Massage In Denver
Do you suffer from chronic pain? Does that pain get in the way of living your life to the fullest? Are you ready to be pain-free? At Wayfare Wellness, our experienced massage therapist will use deep tissue massage to successfully alleviate your chronic pain. We are focused on improving your health and wellness to the best of our abilities.
Book your first appointment with Wayfare Wellness today and experience the best deep tissue massage in Denver.
How You Can Improve Your Recovery From A Car Accident With Massage Therapy
We’ve all been there. You’re waiting for the light to change and get rear-ended. A hydroplaning car careens right into the side of your vehicle. Or you’re momentarily distracted and you slam on your brakes too late. Whichever way it happens, a car accident is never a good situation. After the collision, you’ve got to deal with the headaches of insurance claims and car repairs. But, you also need to treat your personal injuries, even if it was a minor accident. One of the best treatment methods for your injuries following a car accident is massage therapy. Let’s examine how it can contribute to and improve your recovery.
The Recovery Process: How We Recover From An Accident
In the US, roughly 3 million people are injured in car accidents each year. Depending on the severity of the accident, those people may have either a short road or a long road to recovery. What does that recovery process usually look like?
In most cases, you seek out the attention of a medical professional soon after the accident. They treat your injury and set your expectations for the remainder of your healing process. In more minor cases, you might brush off the incident and go about your work week as usual. Either way, we eventually recover from our injuries and feel 100% once more. But, that doesn’t last forever.
Sooner or later, you might notice some recurring pains in your neck, back, or other muscles. You might even experience flare-ups of prior injuries. For many, it’s not always clear why these pains are occurring now.
The answer is simple: Your body undergoes muscular trauma in a car accident. Your body gets jolted, your muscles tensed up, and you were injured. When you get into a vehicular accident, your body can experience some serious muscular problems. These could include:
Whiplash
Lumbar sprains or strains
Cervical sprains or strains
Lower back pains
And much more!
This muscular trauma only gets worse if it’s never properly treated. Regardless of how long it’s been since your car accident, massage therapy can help address that muscular trauma and improve your recovery.
Improving Your Recovery From A Car Accident With Massage Therapy
Let’s examine just a few of the ways that your road to recovery can be improved with massage therapy.
Alleviate Your Chronic Pain And Muscular Problems
Massage therapy offers a non-invasive therapeutic approach to treating chronic pain. To do this, your massage therapist may employ neuromuscular massage — an extremely focused treatment method that can be a bit painful. This intensive approach is necessary to work out the muscular knots and underlying tension that is causing you pain.
While the session may be a little painful, you’ll ultimately experience far less chronic pain afterwards. The powerful pain relief effects of massage therapy have been well documented for years. Numerous studies have also shown how massage therapy can improve accident-related injuries. So, whether you’ve got minor back cramps or recurring pains from your car accident, massage therapy can help.
Improved Sense of Wellbeing
Car accidents bring out the worst in us. We yell, curse, and place blame on each other and ourselves. The whole situation can bring you down, ruining your self-confidence and self-esteem. Fortunately, you can easily repair your sense of self-worth after your car accident with massage therapy.
Research studies have shown that massage can contribute to improving your sense of wellbeing. These impacts can occur even up to 6 months after the accident! But, it doesn’t stop there. Massage therapy has also been shown to improve your mood. So, you can pick yourself up out of the post-accident dumps with a session of massage therapy.
Reduce Your Stress Levels
Car accidents are stressful! The initial collision undoubtedly causes a spike in your cortisol levels. Don’t forget about the stress of dealing with the insurance claims process and finding the time to take your car into the auto-shop. It’s overwhelming, stressful, and messy. Fortunately, massage therapy can help with that too.
Did you know that 15-minutes of massage therapy can help reduce your stress levels? This is due to the fact that massage therapy helps lower your heart rate and blood pressure, relax your muscles, and increase the levels of endorphins in your brain. It should be clear by now that the perfect self-care remedy to follow-up your car accident is massage therapy.
Better Overall Health
We’ve covered some of the best ways that you can improve your recovery from a car accident with massage therapy. But, massage therapy can also benefit your overall health in many additional ways. Do you have mobility or flexibility issues? Do you want to improve the negative side effects of sitting all day? Or are you looking to improve your immune system and your bodily efficiencies? Massage therapy is the answer to all of these problems and more! And when you have better health, you recover from injuries faster.
Speed Up The Recovery From Your Car Accident With Massage Therapy
The car accident has already happened, there’s no use worrying over that now. Now, you need to focus on the present and on the state of your health. If you want to avoid future chronic pain or alleviate your current ones, then it’s time to integrate massage therapy into your recovery.
Schedule your first session with Wayfare Wellness today and start improving your recovery from your car accident with massage therapy!
How To Resolve Chronic Pain With T-Bar Massage
While massage therapy can benefit people from all walks of life, those suffering from chronic pain usually require a more individualized and unique therapeutic approach. Sometimes your pain problems may be too chronic for swedish massage therapy or too centralized for deep tissue massage. If your pain is too severe for traditional forms of therapeutic massage, then you might benefit greatly from t-bar massage.
What is T-Bar Massage and How Can it Benefit Me?
It’s estimated that nearly 20 million Americans suffer from high-impact chronic pain issues on a daily basis. This can greatly limit your daily activities and operations. Highly targeted neuromuscular massage therapy (NMT) can effectively treat those chronic pain issues. Since neuromuscular therapy is so extremely focused, massage therapists will often call upon an NMT tool called a “t-bar.”
The t-bar is used to isolate trigger points and effectively treat those painful areas. Your massage therapist leverages the t-bar to hone in on your pain points and apply greater pressure to specific areas for greater pain relief. To put it more frankly: a t-bar massage allows your massage therapist to reach the root of your pain and treat it right at the source.
How Does T-Bar Massage Work?
The very simple t-bar tool has three central pieces: the handle, the shank, and the tip. This straightforward design helps the massage therapist easily apply concentrated pressure to trigger points. Trigger points are hypersensitive pea-sized knots that usually develop in injured muscles.
Once the trigger point is found, the massage therapist will apply alternating levels of concentrated pressure directly on the trigger point for anywhere between 10-30 seconds. Some patients may experience some discomfort when a massage therapist is using t-bar massage to release tension in the fascia. This is necessary to properly alleviate your points of chronic pain. We recommend working with a licensed NMT therapist that you can openly communicate with to reap the most benefit from t-bar massage.
Those who struggle with chronic pain know that it is a highly personal experience. That’s why t-bar massage is never “one-size-fits-all.” Instead, we utilize a wide variety of t-bars in our neuromuscular massage therapy techniques to give every individual client the maximum benefit possible.
Who Should Try T-Bar Massage?
It should be noted that only certified Neuromuscular Massage Therapists are licensed to practice NMT and use t-bars during massage. You should never receive NMT from a massage therapist who lacks the certification. Our licensed massage therapist, Sarah Monreal, is a dedicated and certified practitioner of NMT, so she understands the minute details of neuromuscular and t-bar massage.
T-bar massage is not for everyone, the same way that neuromuscular massage is not for everyone. Those that have chronic/recurring pain problems can benefit the most from t-bar massage. Additionally, NMT can be incredibly beneficial to those recovering from injuries, accidents, or surgeries. T-bar massage can also help address:
Arthritis
Circulatory problems
Myofascial trigger points
Neural entrapment
Nerve compression
Sciatica
And much more!
If you don’t suffer from any of these conditions, but still have recurring pain problems, you may benefit from our other approaches to massage therapy. Regardless of your therapeutic approach, Wayfare Wellness will develop a personalized treatment plan to address your pain.
Book Your First T-Bar Massage Therapy Session
T-bar massage is the ideal massage therapy solution for anyone who suffers from chronic pain issues. If you find yourself impeded by recurring pain and need relief, then book your first t-bar massage with Wayfare Wellness today!
How Pregnancy Massage In Denver Can Benefit You
The journey of pregnancy can often be an arduous one. Everything you do is impacted by your baby for 9 months, including how you do your work, what you eat, and how your take care of yourself. You’re doing all that you can to ensure the health of your future child, but you’re most likely missing out on the huge health benefits of prenatal massage. Pregnancy massage in Denver can improve the well-being of your fetus and, within a few sessions, you can experience great impacts on your health as well.
If you experience discomfort, recurring pains, excessive anxiety, or have an over-active baby throughout your pregnancy, prenatal massage may be exactly what you need to improve the overall experience of being pregnant.
Improving Your Life with Pregnancy Massage In Denver
Benefits of Prenatal Massage
Therapeutic massage techniques have been shown, time and time again, to improve health, reduce stress, and relieve muscle tension. Pregnancy massage is no exception. The benefits of prenatal massage have been well documented for many years, thanks to thorough research studies. And these benefits are not just limited to the mother or the baby; pregnancy massage in Denver can benefit the health of both parties.
Here are just a few benefits of prenatal massage:
Decreased anxiety - Studies have shown massage therapy lowers cortisol levels in mothers, which, in turn, decreases excessive fetal activity and lowers the rate of premature births.
Improved mood and reduced depression - A research study of 84 depressed women in their second trimester reported that the women experienced higher levels of dopamine and serotonin from a few 20-minute massage therapy sessions per week, along with better neonatal outcomes (i.e., premature births, low birth-weights, etc.).
Reduced pain - Aside from those studies already mentioned above, others have documented how pregnant women have experienced less back pains and leg pains from prenatal massage therapy sessions.
To put it more clearly: prenatal massage improves your physical and psychological well-being, and reduces birthing complications, which makes for an easier pregnancy. And who doesn’t want an easier pregnancy?
Learn more about the benefits of prenatal massage from our previous blog post.
What Would A Pregnancy Massage in Denver Look Like?
First and foremost, your health is the priority. Before booking a prenatal massage session, you should speak to both your doctor and your massage therapist to fully understand the precautions you may need to take. As we’ve covered, the benefits of prenatal massage are many and growing, but the safety/health of you and your baby come first.
While each individual is different and each pregnancy is unique, a typical prenatal massage session could last between 30-60 minutes. For the majority of the session, you will lay on your side (alternating sides halfway through) while resting your body on a pillow, adjusted to your body type and point in the pregnancy. We can adjust your body position throughout the session, to semi-reclined supported positions or other prone positions, if needed.
Massage therapists can use a variety of techniques to address your pain areas. So, if you suffer from neck pains and migraines while pregnant, massage therapists could take a cranial-sacral approach. Or if you have consistently swollen and sensitive feet, perhaps a swedish massage technique would work best. It all depends on your pain points and your comfort level.
Of course, the pacing of the massage, the body positions, and massage pressure will vary from person to person. Comfort is of paramount importance for pregnancy massages in Denver and your massage therapist should be putting your comfort first throughout your massage.
The Best Pregnancy Massage in Denver
At Wayfare Wellness, our certified massage therapist, Sarah, has been thoroughly trained in a wide variety of massage therapy approaches and has practiced them with many clients. One of our specialties is prenatal massage, so Sarah knows the ins-and-outs of prenatal massage and understands exactly how to provide the best pain relief for you.
Whether you’ve just found out you are pregnant or you’re counting down the days in the third trimester, we can develop a personalized massage therapy plan to give you the best results. Wayfare Wellness is a leader in pregnancy massage in Denver, so let us show you how we can benefit you.
Experience the benefits of prenatal massage first hand and book your first massage therapy session with Wayfare Wellness today. Or contact us to learn more about what we can offer.
What Is The Difference Between A Swedish Massage And A Deep Tissue Massage?
We often get clients who are looking for pain relief, an escape from the stress and tension of everyday life, or just a relaxing hour in a tranquil environment. No matter what brings a client into our office, we hear one inquiry more than any other – what kind of massage is right for me?
The answer? It truly depends.
Swedish Massage and Deep Tissue Massage: What's the Difference?
There are many different types of modalities that can be used individually or combined to create the massage therapy experience that will provide the most benefits depending on your lifestyle. Some are more well known than others. All have unique benefits that can play a role in pain relief or simple relaxation. Let's go over a few.
Swedish Massage
Swedish massage is by far the most widely recognized technique in massage therapy. This modality offers more flexibility in pressure, speed, and cadence than others and uses the fingers, knuckles, and palms to create pressure that works into the superficial layers of connective tissue. Many massage therapists will start off a massage therapy session with the Swedish technique to warm the tissues up, making them more responsive to other techniques that may be used in a session.
Who Should Get A Swedish Massage?
First and foremost, Swedish massage is great for beginners. If you are not sure what kind of pressure feels good to you or provides you the most relief, getting a Swedish massage will expose you to a variety of different touches to help you determine your preferences. Additionally, this technique will help your massage therapist explore the needs of your body to better craft a treatment plan that offers the most benefits.
Swedish massage is also great for those who are getting a massage strictly to promote relaxation. Because the technique works primarily in the superficial layers of tissue, those who are seeking massage therapy for pain relief may see better results with a more targeted modality.
Deep Tissue Massage
There are a lot of misconceptions around what exactly a deep tissue massage is. It is not just a massage with added pressure. In fact, deep tissue massage is a unique approach that allows the massage therapist to break up scar tissue and adhesions that have formed in the connective tissue through a process called stripping.
Stripping is a specialized type of stroke that uses slow, deep pressure to release and elongate deep layers of muscle. The goal is to increase blood flow to the specific area to reduce pain. It is through this deep, targeted manipulation of tissue that you start to see recovery and healing.
Who Should Get A Deep Tissue Massage?
Those who suffer from chronic muscle pain are ideal candidates for deep tissue massage. In order to get the most out of your deep tissue massage, though, you will want to consider a long-term treatment plan. It can be a slow process to work into and manipulate the deepest layers of connective tissue so you will want to commit to this type of massage therapy for an extended period of time to truly reap the benefits.
Cranio-Sacral Massage
We talk about cranio-sacral massage therapy a lot at Wayfare Wellness. It is an extremely gentle treatment that often gets overlooked by patients. Cranio-sacral massage focuses on the central nervous system at the head, spine, and sacrum and uses a slight amount of pressure to promote pain relief.
This technique is focused on the the manipulation of the cerebrospinal fluid, as opposed to connective tissue. This fluid is what cushions your central nervous system so limited mobility of the cerebrospinal fluid can lead to excessive tension in the nervous system.
Who Should Get A Cranio-Sacral Massage?
This technique is much more gentle than other types of massage therapy modalities, so it ideal for patients who have experienced a trauma that lead to a shift in their equilibrium. Patients who suffer from spinal cord injuries, PTSD, migraines, fibromyalgia, and other chronic pain disorders may benefit from cranio-sacral massage.
Getting A Massage In Downtown Denver
Whether you want to relax or you need on-going pain relief, massage therapy can play a pivotal role in your regular self-care routine. Our massage therapist at Wayfare Wellness can help you determine the difference between Swedish massage, deep tissue massage, and other modalities to create a treatment plan that is best for you.
Contact Wayfare Wellness to schedule an appointment today.