Where dynamic muscular therapy is all about treating chronic repetitive athletic injuries and resolving dysfunctional movement patterns, sports massage is all about maintaining your hard earned training gains and managing chronic conditions at their best possible level. That is, maintaining the most appropriate range of motion (for their event), minimizing discomfort and maintaining optimal tissue health in the athlete.
How often and when?
How often to receive sports massage and when to receive depends entirely on what type of work you need to maintain your conditioning and when your major events occur. With respect to timing, therapists will often provide a set schedule themselves. This may or may not be appropriate, depending on how much experience a client has in judging their body’s needs. For a non-athlete or an inexperienced athlete, a set schedule determined by the therapist may be the best alternative until the client develops a sense of their need for massage. For the experienced athlete, I prefer to have them note how they feel and perform 24 to 48 hours after treatment and track how long it takes to start lose that “edge” they’ve gained from the work. We want to time the work to make sure the edge stays sharp, not to wait until it gets dull. This is important for both excelling at your event and for injury prevention. At the point when their performance starts to waiver, an athlete will strive to keep up with their competition by pushing their performance past their current conditioning, compensating any which way we have to, risking both traumatic and chronic injury. So tracking when you start to lose your edge, rather than waiting until you are in pain, is important for considering how often an athlete needs to schedule sports massage.
Timing around intense events (workouts, games, meets) is also very important. If the athlete has a chronic injury that has tendency to adhere to the tissue around it, this may require more intensive work that may not be appropriate close to an intense workout or event, so the bodywork has to be scheduled with this in mind. Less intensive work may be extremely beneficial to the athlete’s performance directly before, during and after an intensive event. All of this must be considered by both the athlete and the therapist as a team when considering when treatment is most beneficial.
