Massage may aid fitness routine

There was a time when Rick Bright hesitated to tell people what he does for a living.

“If you told someone you did massage, you always got a little chuckle out of them,” the sports massage therapist said. “Most people connected massage only with a massage parlor. I can imagine it was even worse for women.

“Luckily, we don’t have to deal with that these days. Anymore, just about every gym has a sports massage therapist.”

For good reason, says Jennifer Pope, who works with clients from the Spokane Valley Oz Fitness.

“There are a lot of things that sports massage can do for you,” she said. “A lot of it is structural. It has to do with how you stand and how you function. You can make sure you’re stretched out enough in certain areas so you can maintain good muscle balance.”

Human beings are built out of balance, says Pope.

“We’re all built top-heavy,” she said. “When we work all day at a desk or at a computer, we end up hunched over like a turtle.”

Bodies routinely develop pockets of tight muscles. These adhesions need to be worked loose so the entire muscle group can work properly.

“There’s a difference between a good, relaxing massage and therapy,” Pope said. “A relaxing massage feels really good. Therapy goes a little deeper. We’re not going to the point where we’re causing pain, but you want to feel afterward like you’ve had a good workout.

“Then you want to make certain that you hydrate properly so all the lactic acid that has been worked out of those muscles can be flushed out of your system,” she said.

“You want to be a little sore afterward,” Bright agreed. “But you don’t want to wake up the next day and feel really sore either. You have to find the right approach for you.

“There are ways of working into and out of a muscle area that aren’t painful, but there still are therapists who will jump right in and start working away. That can be painful.”

Both massage therapists insist that problems aren’t always caused by doing something improperly.

“A lot of the time, it’s not a question of doing something wrong,” Bright said. “A lot of the time, it’s about overuse.

“If you make your living lugging big loads of bricks around all day, the problem isn’t that you’re lifting the bricks wrong. It’s the simple fact that you’re doing it all day,” he said.

“It can be the same case with, say, tennis elbow. It may not be a case of hitting the ball wrong – you just could be hitting too many balls.”

A good universal rule of prevention, Pope says, is to do a lot of stretching.

“I have a young client who I’ve been working with who has had a back problem,” she said. “I thought it was strange that a person that young would have this kind of back problem. He plays football, and he just wasn’t getting in the kind of stretching that he needs to prevent these kinds of injuries and problems.

“I recommended to his parents that he get into a martial arts program – most of those programs include a lot of good stretching to maintain a full range of motion.”

Additional problems come into play when people try to compensate for a sedentary work life by playing extra hard on weekends.

“People try to be weekend warriors,” said Bright, who works with clients at the Spokane Athletic Club in addition to maintaining his own clinic in Coeur d’Alene. “At the same time, it’s hard for them to think about cutting back.

“I use a car metaphor all the time. You can wait for the car to break down and then pay to get it repaired, or you can do routine maintenance on it and keep it in good running condition. Sports massage can be part of the routine maintenance you need,” he said.