Sports Massage - An Introduction
Many therapists offer Sports Massage on their “Massage Menu” yet few understand what Sports Massage is about. When a client comes in requesting a Sports Massage, some therapists merely react by going in deep. Sports Massage is so much more.
Whilst Sports Massage does have some aims in common with other forms of massage therapy, the usual experience in conventional massage is to aim to restore the normal function when someone is injured. But in sport there is no ‘normal’ and athletes are always looking to improve and gain a competitive edge. Most athletes aim to reach a level of performance they can never achieve.
A Sports Massage therapist has great potential to assist the athlete to become better, rather than merely normal. In striving to be better, the athlete attempts to systematically increase the level of training and thereby subjecting the body to gradual and controlled overuse. This overuse can often create imbalances and problems in the soft tissues, which if ignored may become chronic. Clearly this may hinder the athlete’s performance and/or rate of improvement. Sports Massage can become a key ingredient in an athlete’s success and this is why top competitors incorporate it as an integral part of their training regime.
So what is Sports Massage? McGillicuddy(1) defines Sports Massage as “the specific application of massage techniques, hydrotherapy protocols, range of motion/flexibility protocol and strength-training principles utilized to achieve a specific goal when treating athletes”. He considers that there are three principles that are vital to understanding what type of Sports Massage to apply to an athlete at any given time.
These principles are:
Timing
Technique
Intent
The timing of Sports Massage is related to when the massage is applied, is it pre-event or post-event, during a maintenance period or possibly post-injury when rehabilitation is required. The technique refers to what massage/stretching/strengthening methods the therapists employs to attempt to achieve the intent, the desired outcome.
The intent of pre-event massage is to warm up the muscles and to get blood flowing through the muscles. The massage techniques generally used are petrissage, vibration, percussion, compression, muscle broadening strokes, etc. With post-event massage, the intent is assist in the recovery process by increasing venous and lymphatic circulation to assist with removal of metabolic by-products and thereby decreasing muscle soreness so that the athlete can return to full training faster. The massage techniques would include effleurage, compression, petrissage, passive movements and light stretching. The intent of maintenance massage is to keep the athletes muscles and tissue in optimum condition and is generally scheduled at a regular frequency (be it weekly or fortnightly), closely married to the athlete’s training program.
Thus Sports Massage is not about going deep nor it is learning one technique. The requirement for the therapist is to apply the appropriate treatment at the appropriate time, which takes education, skill and experience.
The auther writes articles on different topics. To know more, visit sports massage, exposed acne treatment ripoff
Have You Taken Your Micro-Nutriments Today?
Did you know that most diseases are linked to nutrient deficiencies or imbalances? Your body is very resilient and can get by in a weakened state for quite some time but then the almost inevitable happens�ailments and disease set in.
Your organs require a broad range of nutrients in order to function properly and to keep the cells in your body supplied with all the chemicals and hormones they need. If any critical nutrients are missing or deficient, then breakdowns in cellular metabolism are sure to happen resulting in disease and accelerated aging.
This is where micro-nutriments come in. They consist of a whole range of necessary substances that your body requires to keep all systems operating at peak efficiency. These nutriments are often lacking due to a poor diet, a poor ability to extract nutrients from the food, and/or a food supply which is lacking in certain nutrients.
Diet - A poor diet is one which is based on processed foods (containing sugar, vegetable oils, additives, and preservatives), lacking in Omega-3 fish oils, low in high-quality proteins and fats, and lacking in sufficient fiber and water.
Nutrient Extraction - Many people suffer from a poor ability to extract nutrients out of the food they eat. This is often due to a lack of specific enzymes in the upper intestine which allows the digestive system to break down the nutrients in the food into molecules that are small enough to pass through the membrane of the small intestine. It is also vital to have a properly functioning large intestine. Sufficient fiber (at least 24 grams per day) will help keep your colon in good working order.
Food Supply - Due to modern farming practices, most staple foods today contain only a fraction of the nutrients the same foods used to have only fifty years ago.
What can be done about the above listed deficiencies? There is only one choice � dietary supplementation.
What does a micro-nutriment supplement consist of? These supplements include all the necessary vitamins and minerals, a broad spectrum of potent antioxidants, an array of important amino acids, bioflavanoids, herbal extracts and enzymes.
You could purchase many of these compounds separately, but this is risky business. How do you know it is safe to take the different products together, not to mention what dosage levels you might need? It makes far more sense to use a comprehensive supplement which combines all of these ingredients in their correct forms and in the correct ratios, taking into account the synergy of all the ingredients.
What do we mean by synergy. Well, that's a fancy word which means that everything must work together so that each ingredient enhances or supports the others. If ingredients are mismatched they will cancel each other out or worse, could even be harmful. More is often not better. For example, high doses of vitamin C as ascorbic acid, can do you more harm than good because additional free radicals are generated.
Micro-nutriments are also available at different potencies. Similar ingredients can be manufactured at 3% potency or 98% potency levels, for example. Which do you think is being used in a cheap supermarket supplement? The lesson � You can't cheap out on micro-nutriments if you want them to work!
We need to say more about ingredient blending. Low cost supplements often don't contain the amount of ingredients they claim possibly due to unsatisfactory blending methods. Typically the process might consist of adding all the ingredients at once into a mixer for 20 minutes and then forming into a tablet or capsule. A professional supplement made to pharmaceutical standards will mix the various ingredients in different combinations several times before the final product is produced. Special blenders are used to prevent any ingredients from settling so as to guarantee even distribution and exact quantities of ingredients.
The final thing to consider in choosing a micro-nutriment supplement is the delivery system. Once you ingest a nutrient, they are immediately attacked by stomach acids and enzymes. Some important nutrients cannot survive this digestive process. Therefore, a quality supplement will use a pharmaceutical-grade enteric coating on the tablets. This coating will allow safe passage through the stomach and will only breakdown and release the nutrients in the alkaline environment of the upper intestine. The nutrients can then be properly absorbed through the intestinal lining and go to work nourishing the cells and organs.
So, have you taken your micro-nutriments today? I certainly hope so! If not, then consider adding professionally manufactured supplements to enhance your overall health, ensure that your body won't age prematurely and is properly nourished to function optimally in a polluted world.
------
Rick Duker is an independent health researcher and is an avid user of professional supplements. Before you purchase any health supplement make sure you have all the information you need to make an informed choice. Check out all the resources at...
http://www.UltimateHealthBoost.com
Get Out and Exercise
Let's talk about exercise.
There are many ways to exercise, and we all need variety but don't always have daily time blocked out for exercise. Here are a few tips to get exercise incorporated into your lifestyle instead of starting for a month and losing your momentum.
Yoga can provide a lot of variety to combat boredom, because there are literally thousands of postures you can try and learn. Power Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga (same thing, basically) is the very best form of exercise around, if done on a daily basis. Power Yoga gives you strengthening, stretching, and aerobic exercise all in one, but it doesn't provide a lot of variety.
In reality, scrubbing the floor is exercise; raking leaves is exercise. Shoveling snow or climbing 7 flights of stairs is exercise. Of course, you have to put effort into these activities to make them worthy of being called exercise. So, if you've accomplished something like this during the day, chalk it up!
Next, set your goal to exercise every other day, at least. So, if you know you didn't get any exercise yesterday, be sure to do something today. Preferably, exercise should be done in the morning before breakfast, or the afternoon before supper.
Another way of getting exercise is to do something with the kids, whether it's swimming, biking, rollerblading, skating, or playing football in the yard. And yes, you can chalk this up as your exercise for the day, as well. This also helps foster relationships with your kids and sets a good example for them to exercise, too.
In this way, you can smoothly incorporate exercise into your life without really trying.
The key is to do some form of exercise, even though you don't really feel like doing it! Many of us rarely feel like exercising, but once we get started, we feel great! Remember, it's just getting started! Force yourself to get moving.
Here is another of the exercise routines that really is the most simple to incorporate into your life � it's weight-lifting. Following is an amazing program of weight-lifting that takes about 20 minutes, once a week. Anyone, including you, can make time for this. Set aside one day a week when you absolutely must do this routine before breakfast.
Here's what you do. You are going to work your major muscle groups all over your body: Biceps, Triceps, Quads, Calves, Lats, and Chest. Six exercises. You can add more later, once you get the concept.
The aim of this workout is to lift very slowly and lower very slowly, doing repetitions until the muscle is totally spent. Count to 7 going up and count to 7 going down. This is a very slow, controlled lift, both up and down.
You should be lifting enough weight that you are only able to complete between 4 and 10 reps. At the end of your last rep, when you can lift no more (it will be in the middle of a rep that your muscle fails), you are supposed to hold that position for an extra 10 seconds. This is hard!
All the time that you are raising and lowering the weight, you are breathing as much as you need to. You'll start out with one or two breaths per lift up and the same going down. As the reps become more difficult, your breathing becomes faster, until at the end of your reps, you are breathing very rapidly.
The exercise ball, which can be easily added to this routine, is very effective for abdominals, because you are using muscles to keep your balance as well as using the muscles during the crunches.
At the end of your workout, you should be breathing hard. You will have sore muscles for a few days afterwards. This is why it is a once/week program, so that your muscles have time to repair. It's during this recovery period that your muscles become stronger.
Some experts say that during the above workout, you are getting an aerobic workout along with the muscle-building workout because the muscles are using air while working, just like jogging.
Normal weight lifting is said to be anaerobic (without oxygen) because you are exhaling on the exertion portion of the repetition.
Experts recommend you get three aerobic exercise sessions during a week, to support your heart muscle, plus weight-bearing exercise. So you need at least a couple other sessions of aerobic exercise besides the above routine. Do something fun! Or get a chore out of the way and give the floor a good old-fashioned scrubbing. Just get moving!
Anyway, those are just some suggestions for an exercise routine that's really easy to stick with. Be creative and incorporate what works for you.
And remember that muscle burns more energy than fat, so your muscle to fat ratio will improve, too. Muscle weighs more than fat, so you need to go by how you look, not by what the scale says. Here's to Good, Fun Exercise for You!
------
Anita Murray is a Professional Health Coach, Nutritional Consultant, and Founding Editor/Owner of FibromyalgiaHope.com. To learn more about natural ways to support your health, take this unique, Interactive E-course, entitled "8 PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR LIVING FREE OF FIBROMYALGIA". Discover simple ideas that will change the course of your illness forever.
Whilst Sports Massage does have some aims in common with other forms of massage therapy, the usual experience in conventional massage is to aim to restore the normal function when someone is injured. But in sport there is no ‘normal’ and athletes are always looking to improve and gain a competitive edge. Most athletes aim to reach a level of performance they can never achieve.
A Sports Massage therapist has great potential to assist the athlete to become better, rather than merely normal. In striving to be better, the athlete attempts to systematically increase the level of training and thereby subjecting the body to gradual and controlled overuse. This overuse can often create imbalances and problems in the soft tissues, which if ignored may become chronic. Clearly this may hinder the athlete’s performance and/or rate of improvement. Sports Massage can become a key ingredient in an athlete’s success and this is why top competitors incorporate it as an integral part of their training regime.
So what is Sports Massage? McGillicuddy(1) defines Sports Massage as “the specific application of massage techniques, hydrotherapy protocols, range of motion/flexibility protocol and strength-training principles utilized to achieve a specific goal when treating athletes”. He considers that there are three principles that are vital to understanding what type of Sports Massage to apply to an athlete at any given time.
These principles are:
Timing
Technique
Intent
The timing of Sports Massage is related to when the massage is applied, is it pre-event or post-event, during a maintenance period or possibly post-injury when rehabilitation is required. The technique refers to what massage/stretching/strengthening methods the therapists employs to attempt to achieve the intent, the desired outcome.
The intent of pre-event massage is to warm up the muscles and to get blood flowing through the muscles. The massage techniques generally used are petrissage, vibration, percussion, compression, muscle broadening strokes, etc. With post-event massage, the intent is assist in the recovery process by increasing venous and lymphatic circulation to assist with removal of metabolic by-products and thereby decreasing muscle soreness so that the athlete can return to full training faster. The massage techniques would include effleurage, compression, petrissage, passive movements and light stretching. The intent of maintenance massage is to keep the athletes muscles and tissue in optimum condition and is generally scheduled at a regular frequency (be it weekly or fortnightly), closely married to the athlete’s training program.
Thus Sports Massage is not about going deep nor it is learning one technique. The requirement for the therapist is to apply the appropriate treatment at the appropriate time, which takes education, skill and experience.
The auther writes articles on different topics. To know more, visit sports massage, exposed acne treatment ripoff
Have You Taken Your Micro-Nutriments Today?
Did you know that most diseases are linked to nutrient deficiencies or imbalances? Your body is very resilient and can get by in a weakened state for quite some time but then the almost inevitable happens�ailments and disease set in.
Your organs require a broad range of nutrients in order to function properly and to keep the cells in your body supplied with all the chemicals and hormones they need. If any critical nutrients are missing or deficient, then breakdowns in cellular metabolism are sure to happen resulting in disease and accelerated aging.
This is where micro-nutriments come in. They consist of a whole range of necessary substances that your body requires to keep all systems operating at peak efficiency. These nutriments are often lacking due to a poor diet, a poor ability to extract nutrients from the food, and/or a food supply which is lacking in certain nutrients.
Diet - A poor diet is one which is based on processed foods (containing sugar, vegetable oils, additives, and preservatives), lacking in Omega-3 fish oils, low in high-quality proteins and fats, and lacking in sufficient fiber and water.
Nutrient Extraction - Many people suffer from a poor ability to extract nutrients out of the food they eat. This is often due to a lack of specific enzymes in the upper intestine which allows the digestive system to break down the nutrients in the food into molecules that are small enough to pass through the membrane of the small intestine. It is also vital to have a properly functioning large intestine. Sufficient fiber (at least 24 grams per day) will help keep your colon in good working order.
Food Supply - Due to modern farming practices, most staple foods today contain only a fraction of the nutrients the same foods used to have only fifty years ago.
What can be done about the above listed deficiencies? There is only one choice � dietary supplementation.
What does a micro-nutriment supplement consist of? These supplements include all the necessary vitamins and minerals, a broad spectrum of potent antioxidants, an array of important amino acids, bioflavanoids, herbal extracts and enzymes.
You could purchase many of these compounds separately, but this is risky business. How do you know it is safe to take the different products together, not to mention what dosage levels you might need? It makes far more sense to use a comprehensive supplement which combines all of these ingredients in their correct forms and in the correct ratios, taking into account the synergy of all the ingredients.
What do we mean by synergy. Well, that's a fancy word which means that everything must work together so that each ingredient enhances or supports the others. If ingredients are mismatched they will cancel each other out or worse, could even be harmful. More is often not better. For example, high doses of vitamin C as ascorbic acid, can do you more harm than good because additional free radicals are generated.
Micro-nutriments are also available at different potencies. Similar ingredients can be manufactured at 3% potency or 98% potency levels, for example. Which do you think is being used in a cheap supermarket supplement? The lesson � You can't cheap out on micro-nutriments if you want them to work!
We need to say more about ingredient blending. Low cost supplements often don't contain the amount of ingredients they claim possibly due to unsatisfactory blending methods. Typically the process might consist of adding all the ingredients at once into a mixer for 20 minutes and then forming into a tablet or capsule. A professional supplement made to pharmaceutical standards will mix the various ingredients in different combinations several times before the final product is produced. Special blenders are used to prevent any ingredients from settling so as to guarantee even distribution and exact quantities of ingredients.
The final thing to consider in choosing a micro-nutriment supplement is the delivery system. Once you ingest a nutrient, they are immediately attacked by stomach acids and enzymes. Some important nutrients cannot survive this digestive process. Therefore, a quality supplement will use a pharmaceutical-grade enteric coating on the tablets. This coating will allow safe passage through the stomach and will only breakdown and release the nutrients in the alkaline environment of the upper intestine. The nutrients can then be properly absorbed through the intestinal lining and go to work nourishing the cells and organs.
So, have you taken your micro-nutriments today? I certainly hope so! If not, then consider adding professionally manufactured supplements to enhance your overall health, ensure that your body won't age prematurely and is properly nourished to function optimally in a polluted world.
------
Rick Duker is an independent health researcher and is an avid user of professional supplements. Before you purchase any health supplement make sure you have all the information you need to make an informed choice. Check out all the resources at...
http://www.UltimateHealthBoost.com
Get Out and Exercise
Let's talk about exercise.
There are many ways to exercise, and we all need variety but don't always have daily time blocked out for exercise. Here are a few tips to get exercise incorporated into your lifestyle instead of starting for a month and losing your momentum.
Yoga can provide a lot of variety to combat boredom, because there are literally thousands of postures you can try and learn. Power Yoga or Ashtanga Yoga (same thing, basically) is the very best form of exercise around, if done on a daily basis. Power Yoga gives you strengthening, stretching, and aerobic exercise all in one, but it doesn't provide a lot of variety.
In reality, scrubbing the floor is exercise; raking leaves is exercise. Shoveling snow or climbing 7 flights of stairs is exercise. Of course, you have to put effort into these activities to make them worthy of being called exercise. So, if you've accomplished something like this during the day, chalk it up!
Next, set your goal to exercise every other day, at least. So, if you know you didn't get any exercise yesterday, be sure to do something today. Preferably, exercise should be done in the morning before breakfast, or the afternoon before supper.
Another way of getting exercise is to do something with the kids, whether it's swimming, biking, rollerblading, skating, or playing football in the yard. And yes, you can chalk this up as your exercise for the day, as well. This also helps foster relationships with your kids and sets a good example for them to exercise, too.
In this way, you can smoothly incorporate exercise into your life without really trying.
The key is to do some form of exercise, even though you don't really feel like doing it! Many of us rarely feel like exercising, but once we get started, we feel great! Remember, it's just getting started! Force yourself to get moving.
Here is another of the exercise routines that really is the most simple to incorporate into your life � it's weight-lifting. Following is an amazing program of weight-lifting that takes about 20 minutes, once a week. Anyone, including you, can make time for this. Set aside one day a week when you absolutely must do this routine before breakfast.
Here's what you do. You are going to work your major muscle groups all over your body: Biceps, Triceps, Quads, Calves, Lats, and Chest. Six exercises. You can add more later, once you get the concept.
The aim of this workout is to lift very slowly and lower very slowly, doing repetitions until the muscle is totally spent. Count to 7 going up and count to 7 going down. This is a very slow, controlled lift, both up and down.
You should be lifting enough weight that you are only able to complete between 4 and 10 reps. At the end of your last rep, when you can lift no more (it will be in the middle of a rep that your muscle fails), you are supposed to hold that position for an extra 10 seconds. This is hard!
All the time that you are raising and lowering the weight, you are breathing as much as you need to. You'll start out with one or two breaths per lift up and the same going down. As the reps become more difficult, your breathing becomes faster, until at the end of your reps, you are breathing very rapidly.
The exercise ball, which can be easily added to this routine, is very effective for abdominals, because you are using muscles to keep your balance as well as using the muscles during the crunches.
At the end of your workout, you should be breathing hard. You will have sore muscles for a few days afterwards. This is why it is a once/week program, so that your muscles have time to repair. It's during this recovery period that your muscles become stronger.
Some experts say that during the above workout, you are getting an aerobic workout along with the muscle-building workout because the muscles are using air while working, just like jogging.
Normal weight lifting is said to be anaerobic (without oxygen) because you are exhaling on the exertion portion of the repetition.
Experts recommend you get three aerobic exercise sessions during a week, to support your heart muscle, plus weight-bearing exercise. So you need at least a couple other sessions of aerobic exercise besides the above routine. Do something fun! Or get a chore out of the way and give the floor a good old-fashioned scrubbing. Just get moving!
Anyway, those are just some suggestions for an exercise routine that's really easy to stick with. Be creative and incorporate what works for you.
And remember that muscle burns more energy than fat, so your muscle to fat ratio will improve, too. Muscle weighs more than fat, so you need to go by how you look, not by what the scale says. Here's to Good, Fun Exercise for You!
------
Anita Murray is a Professional Health Coach, Nutritional Consultant, and Founding Editor/Owner of FibromyalgiaHope.com. To learn more about natural ways to support your health, take this unique, Interactive E-course, entitled "8 PROVEN STRATEGIES FOR LIVING FREE OF FIBROMYALGIA". Discover simple ideas that will change the course of your illness forever.