Treating Your Trigger Points

by Rich Poley©

“The key to treating trigger points is to lengthen the muscle fibers that are shortened by the trigger point mechanism.” Travell & Simons’ Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, Volume 2, page136.

Gentle stretching lengthens muscles and removes many latent trigger points; but not even the super heroes of stretching, yoga and Pilates, will get them all. Trigger point therapy, which can be a powerful extension of yoga and Pilates, will eliminate the most dangerous ones. This simple remedy can be incorporated into most fitness classes.

Finding
Because you have many trigger points, they’ll be easy to find. Just press different places on a muscle until you hit a tender spot. Trigger points are more likely to be found in the areas of your body that are stiff and tense. Your upper back is a good place to look. If you run, you’ll find trigger points in your leg muscles. If you swim or play tennis, you’ll find them in your shoulders. Almost everyone has them in the bottoms of their feet.

Releasing
Once you’ve located a trigger point, continue pressing it until the tenderness goes away. Pulsing or slightly changing the angle you’re pressing usually helps. Mild trigger points should resolve within five breaths. After releasing a trigger point, slowly move the muscle through its full range of motion three times. An extremely tender point may take more than one session to dissolve. Use a body marking pen to tag it and come back to it on succeeding days.

Relaxing
Relaxation facilitates stretching and is the secret to releasing trigger points. To relax a muscle, you must relieve it of its work load. Muscles perform two jobs: they stabilize and mobilize. If your muscles are working to stabilize you, they won’t be able to relax. To relieve your muscles of this burden, lie down, preferably on a yoga or Pilates mat. Here are some more tips to help you deactivate triggers:

• Warm your muscles with exercise, a shower, a hot tub, or by gliding your hands over them.
• Use a massage tool to extend your reach and power to press deeply with less effort.
• Let gravity do the work by placing the tool between the mat and your trigger point.
• Tensing a muscle before relaxing it, will identify the muscle and help it release.
• Straighten the muscle and direct your full attention toward feeling it let go.
• Breathe slowly and deeply into your abdomen, exhalation is relaxation.
• Relaxation is an active process.

Benefiting
Trigger point therapy will remove the knots from your muscles. To find out how much better you’ll feel and perform, try it. It’s the difference between yes and no.

Trigger Points: Are They in You?

Photo by a2gemma
Article by Rich Poley

Debilitating Little Buggers
Trigger points weaken muscles, reduce range of motion, and drain endurance. While you may not have heard of them, you’ve experienced them. Everyone who’s had muscle pain and stiffness has experienced trigger points. They are the tender spots or knots that grow in your muscles. They’ve been written about in thousands of articles in medical journals and authoritatively described in Myofacial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual, by David G. Simons, M.D., Janet G. Travell, M.D., and Lois S. Simons, P.T.
You’ve seen the long-term effects of untreated trigger points in the elderly, their bodies twisted and reactions slowed. Gradually, over many years, knotted muscle fibers reduce people’s range of motion and sap their strength until they have trouble getting out of a chair. Decrepitude is thought to be part of the normal aging process. When caused by trigger points, which it usually is, it’s preventable. Trigger points are the most easily treatable significant muscle problem that you’re certain to face.

Tiny Knots
Medical doctors believe trigger points form naturally as a result of muscle abuse. Over and under use of muscles causes the ultra thin fibers that make-up muscles to tangle into the tiny knots that are trigger points. The knots cause muscles to shorten and tense.
Trigger points are of two types: latent and active. Both cause all the muscle dysfunctions described above but only active trigger points spontaneously emit pain. Active triggers are relatively rare but everyone suffers latent ones. While trigger points appear naturally, they also disappear naturally when your muscles are stretched.

Stretching Them
Here’s the rule: elongating muscles removes trigger points. Gentle natural stretching that’s part of normal daily activities eliminates most small triggers. Yoga, Pilates, and fitness classes resolve many of the more stubborn ones. Unfortunately, the toughest trigger points persist and require a more precise controlled stretch that comes from pressing directly on the muscle. This form of massage, known as trigger point therapy, elongates the muscle and removes the knot.

Do it Yourself Trigger Point Massage
The good news is that trigger point therapy is easy to do. With a little knowledge and the right massage tool you can restore muscle strength, flexibility, and endurance to your own body. You can remove all your latent trigger points simply by pressing them. Ninety-percent of trigger point therapy is just pressing muscle tissue. You can tell you’ve hit one when the spot you’ve compressed is exquisitely tender. Stay with it for about five breaths or until the pain subsides.

Pressing Them
Yes, trigger points are in you. If you want to improve muscle performance and avoid the physical frailty of old-age, you have to get them out and keep getting them out. Fortunately, it’s easy. Just press them and they’re gone. Doing so, improves the way you look, feel, and perform.

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Check out my latest YouTube video: Balls On Quads Massage: Do It While You View It. It's fun action. The intent of the video is not to teach you anything but to help you to feel something, to help you feel better when you finish than when you started. If it does that it has succeeded, if not it has failed. Give it a try let me know how it does.

Trigger Point Yoga

Admit it, you go to yoga for one reason and one reason only because it makes you feel better. For you, better might mean healthier, stronger, more flexible, or happier. Adding massage to your yoga practice will make you feel even better. How much better? For some it’s the difference between a firefly and a fire. Here’s why:

Massage and yoga are two different ways to stretch your muscles and two different ways to release trigger points. Trigger points are those nasty little knots that form in muscles day and night. If your body is to feel its best, you must continually release them. Yoga and massage release different types of trigger points.

If you weren’t aware that yoga asanas release trigger points, you’re not alone. Few yoga practitioners are aware of this hidden benefit. Fewer still are aware that trigger points are continually forming in their muscles. The more active you are the more trigger points you’re likely to have. Every time your muscles are overworked trigger points grow.

One reason you practice yoga is because of a need, albeit unconscious, to release trigger points. In part, it’s that release that gives you a sense of pleasure and pain. But yoga doesn’t release all of your trigger points. Some trigger points are resistant to yoga and release only when direct pressure is applied to the muscle, by pressing on it with a finger or a massage tool. The best way to eliminate trigger points is a combination of pressing and stretching your muscles which is what trigger point yoga is all about.

What’s a trigger point?
Think of a trigger point as a knot of muscle fibers. It serves as a defense mechanism when your muscles are injured, over worked, or weakened in some way. The tiny strands that make up your muscles contract into a hard knot. Imagine an injured muscle as being like a scared turtle receding into its shell. It’s a good defensive strategy but not good for getting any work done. Trigger point therapy is a way of getting your muscle to come out of its shell so it can get back to doing its job.

If the trigger point is not released your muscle will remain weakened. Other muscles will be recruited to do its job and they too will be compromised as they try to make up for your slacker muscle. In a weakened state, they’re more likely to get injured and form trigger points of their own, until your entire muscle group looses strength and range of motion.

This loss usually happens gradually over a long period of time so its not noticeable. Your loss of strength and range of motion will be blamed on the usual suspects: old age and arthritis. You will become less and less active and eventually your body will give up and you’ll take drugs to ease the pain. That too will happen over a long period of time so you’ll accept it as part of the natural aging process. Don’t!

What Types?
There are two types of trigger points, active and latent. The active ones emit pain on their own so you are aware you have one. The latent ones are sneakier and only emit pain when pressed. Latent trigger points are much more common. Both types reduce muscle function and can be resolved in the same way. Unless they’re released they will continue to weaken your muscular system and burn excess energy doing so.

Pressing it is stretching it
When trigger points are pressed they hurt. If they continue to be pressed the pain will give way to gain, and disappear like a fist when you open your hand.

Go
If you want to leave the yoga room feeling much better than when you entered it, add a touch of trigger point massage to your yoga practice. Click here to learn more about trigger point yoga.

above photo by Neeta Lind

Trigger Points and Booty Ball Massage

If you want to run faster Booty Ball Massage is your ticket, here’s why:

Over time everyone, you, me, President-elect Obama develop knots in our muscles that reduce our strength. These knots are called trigger points. (For the extensive scientific evidence supporting this theory this see the two volume treatise by Travell and Simons Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual . In a more accessible form see Claire Davies book The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook.

Trigger points develop spontaneously in muscles all over our bodies. Pressing on them through massage and other forms of body work releases them. That’s one of the reasons massage can be painful.

Until a trigger point is released the muscle in which it lives is weakened and other muscles must do the inhibited muscle’s work which weakens those muscles as well. You’ve probably seen elderly people whose old bent bodies can barely function. It’s usually not old age per se that’s crippling them but the accumulation of unreleased trigger points.

Releasing trigger points is easy to do when you’re young and relatively healthy. All you have to do is press on them with enough force to release them which can be painful. As a matter of fact that’s how you know you’ve found one, it emits what has been described as an “exquisite tenderness” when pressed. Yikes!

Anyway one big place these trigger points live until they’re released is your butt. Your glutes are the largest muscles in your body and unless you’re massaging them regularly trigger points are growing in them and weakening them and the surrounding muscles. This of course reduces glute and leg strength which reduces your running speed.

One easy way to release trigger points in your glutes is to allow your body weight to do it while you’re sitting at work or watching a video. That’s why I created the booty ball massage video now on YouTube. Watch the video, do booty ball massage and your trigger points will disappear like a fist when you open your hand. You’ll feel better and run faster.

Introduction to the New Massage

A massage a day will do more for you than keep the doctor away.

The best time to get a massage is when you need one.

Benefits
You win if you can improve your health, mood, and fitness level while reducing injuries, stress, and muscle pain.

By taking simple ideas from massage therapy and tweaking them, self-massage transfers the benefits of massage directly to the end user.

Music for The Body
Massage therapy created a simple system that could be transferred from teacher to student by applying basic ideas from science, medicine, and anatomy. Self-massage delivers that simple system directly to the consumer.

Self-massage is massage for the digital age: it’s immediate, portable, and powerful. It’s when you need it, where you need it. Like the web itself, self-massage eliminates the frictions of time and money by delivering information instantly and freely.

Making access to information infinitely easier changes the nature of the information.

Self-massage takes a good thing and makes it better by changing the delivery system. A small change makes a big difference. It’s like moving music from the 19th century concert hall of the privileged few to the headphones of the 21st century for everyone to enjoy.

Now
Massage is an idea whose roots go back to prehistory, and contain hundreds of variations. Massage therapies like Swedish massage, shiatsu, reflexology, and trigger point therapy, are constructs invented during the 19th and 20th centuries. Their common elements are a for-profit-two-party-delivery-system where giver and receiver are separate people. Inherent in this model are the enormous frictions of time and money. These frictions are eliminated when giver and receiver are one.

By eliminating transaction costs and reducing the frictions of the market place, self-massage opens up massage to everyone. Self-massage is to massage therapy what the web is to the printed page, it’s the next step, a transfer of power from the few to the many. Self-massage takes massage to the 21st century in the same way massage therapy took it to the 20th.

Doing it yourself is new. Combining the benefits of massage therapy with the immediacy of self-massage is now. When you have an itch you scratch it, no waiting, no fee. Self-massage is massage for the digital age.

The best way to convey the power of massage is to experience it.

Check out this YouTube video: Self-Massage for Athletes.

Wake-Up Massage & Yoga

The goal of wake-up massage is to make your body feel and perform better by getting out the kinks caused by a “good” night’s sleep and the soreness and stress caused by a “bad” night’s sleep. Traditionally this kind of massage is done before getting out of bed and takes about ten to fifteen minutes.

Wake-up massage allows you to zero in on the muscles most affected by your nocturnal twists and turns, on those occasions when you awaken with your neck at a right angle to your head or one of your legs twisted under the other. The problems sleep causes can drag on for days or be gone with a few minutes of massage in the morning. You can do it yourself or hire a professional.

Many people believe that they are entitled to wake up fully refreshed and invigorated. Most of the time though we wake up in the morning feeling as if we’d been in an accident. We’re tired and have deep doubts about how we’re going to get through the day.

Little has been written about massage in the morning because people use to believe there was only one small part of the human anatomy that needed a massage in the morning. Science has debunked that theory and many scientists now believe that massaging the whole body in the morning is a good idea, especially if it’s their body that’s getting massaged.

We’re not too concerned now about technique. You can pick that up on the website. What you will probably want to know now is how morning massage will benefit you. How will it improve that most important relationship of all, the one you have with yourself?
Having played around with morning massage for a while, here are the three main benefits I’ve gotten:

1. Morning massage relieves muscle pain and soreness, i.e., those tiny knots called trigger points that often form in muscles while I sleep. Massage gets rid of them.

2. A massage in the morning identifies muscle pain and soreness so I can focus on those areas of my body that are weakest and most likely to get injured. By detecting these tiny injuries early, I’m able to prevent them from growing into large debilitating problems. Massage is an effective way to eliminate them.

3. Massage has been shown to improve health and mood by reducing stress which not only affects my mental well-being but physical well-being. Most illnesses are believed to be related to stress. I notice I’ve experienced far fewer sick days since starting my day with a massage.

Can I have all these benefits independent of massage? Definitely. There are other ways to relieve muscle pain and soreness, improve health and mood, and prevent injury. So why even consider using massage? This is a hard case to make, only if you have to get a massage therapist over every morning when you wake up.

The value of self-massage is obvious: immediacy and cost. No other therapy or medicine can work as quickly and cost effectively with no harmful side effects.
With self-massage you get instantaneous feedback from the only person who knows how your body feels. Your body tells your hands exactly how deep to go, how long to go, and where to go.

I’m a big believer in using self-massage to understand how massage works, even if you are fortunate enough to wake up next to a massage therapist in the morning. After all, you didn’t understand the value of working out until you started doing it regularly yourself, even if you were living with an athlete.

The benefits you get from massage are only going to be achieved when you’re genuinely interested in feeling and performing better. If you’re interested, take self-massage for a test run, play around with it and let me know what you think.

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