Trigger Point Therapy

Find out what Trigger Point Therapy is and how it can help with headaches, and shoulder, neck, and back pain.

Modalities

To achieve the best result, this service may be combined with other modalities such as:

Myofascial Cupping – to reduce fascial adhesions and allow getting faster to the source of the pain.
Soft Tissue Mobilisation Instruments – to break down fascial restrictions and scar tissue and to achieve faster pain relief, improve mobility, and quicker rehabilitation and recovery.
Dry Needling – to target a trigger point, decrease muscle tightness, increase blood flow and reduce pain.
Therapeutic Ultrasound (coming soon) – to help with swelling and inflammation and to promote healing.

What are Trigger Points?

Trigger Points are hyper-irritable spots in a contracted muscle. These spots can lead to local tenderness, pain, and dysfunction within the muscle.

When muscle contraction or direct compression happens, it might be evidence of a jump sign or referred pain.

A jump sign happens when pressure is applied on the Trigger Point, and the person feels an intense pain directly proportional to the amount of pressure applied. Other evidence of the jump sign is involuntary movements like jolting other body parts not being touched.

Muscle contractions can be visible and palpable and respond to the pressure applied on a Trigger Point.

Referred or Reflective pain is when a Trigger Point in one muscle creates pain in another area than the site of the painful stimulus.

An example is when there is a Trigger Point in the trapezius (the muscle at the top of the shoulder). You will feel pain in the side of your neck and head, leading to a headache.

And what about muscle knots?

A muscle knot is a colloquial term for the more scientific myofascial trigger point, a hard, palpable nodule in a taut band of skeletal muscle divided into two groups. Some can be unexpectedly painful, while others are only painful when squeezed or compressed. The first group are active trigger points, and the second is latent trigger points. Both trigger points type can lead to muscle dysfunction, pain, weakness, and a loss of range of movement. When the muscle is injured, the knot may form a protective mechanism to limit movement and protect the injured area. A trigger point is a spot in a muscle that, when pressed, reproduces pain in another part of the body.

The most common trigger point locations are in the neck and shoulder muscles. These knots often cause pain or discomfort that can be relieved by applying pressure to them with a finger or thumb. The goal of massage therapy for trigger points is to release those knots and ease any associated pain.

Trigger-point myofascial therapy relieves pain from these knots by using deep tissue work to break up those fibres and ease muscle tension.

Body Trigger Points
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What is Trigger Point Therapy?

Trigger Point Therapy is a treatment that releases the tightest areas of your body, helping to improve range of motion, posture, and alignment.

Regular sessions can help with chronic pain, which is sometimes the result of referral pain from those trigger points.

Sessions can also help with athletic performance and acute pain from injuries and accidents.

During a trigger point therapy session, the client will take deep breaths and identify the exact location and intensity of the discomfort.

Trigger Point is a proven method to treat Headaches stemming from tight upper back and neck muscles.

Shoulder pain causes trauma during sports or other activities, such as repetitive strain during lifting.

What does a muscle knot look like?

A primary or central trigger point will cause severe pain locally. This can be accompanied by pain in another region on the pressure map. Usually are based around the centre of a muscle belly.

Secondary trigger points generally come from a more severe pain condition and only appear when the primary point of injury is treated. However, it can be present in the form of a cluster.

What conditions can Trigger Point Massage treat?

Headaches

Trigger points are often a source of headache pain, not nerves, psychological or vascular conditions.

While other problems also cause headaches, trigger point therapy can help with conditions such as migraines, cluster headaches, etc.

While many muscles can contain trigger points that refer to pain in the head, in most cases, the muscle groups that are often involved are the Trapezius and Sternocleidomastoid muscle groups.

You will feel that headaches are worse when you move your head. This is because some of your neck muscles are overloaded.

That’s why you usually want to lie down and not move and rest the muscles that move your head until the pain disappears.

Shoulder pain

The shoulder joint is the part of the body that might be affected by trigger points very often as it relies upon different muscle groups.

The shoulder lets our arms move freely and have a wide range of movement; this is why the muscles around it have to work correctly; otherwise, they might play a significant role in shoulder dysfunction disorders.

The rotator cuff muscle group is the most important of all the muscle groups that act on the shoulder joint.

These are small muscles that, if overloaded, trigger points can cause chronic tension.

Neck-Upper Back pain

The inability to turn your head is an excellent example of how important it is to maintain neck pain at a distance. In addition, we might not be able to walk correctly as the head leads the way when we walk.

We will also realize how heavy our head is and how much we need the strength of the muscles to hold and move our head. Trigger point therapy will help alleviate neck pain and relax your neck muscles. Two muscle groups trigger neck pain disorders, the Trapezius and the Levator Scapula.

Don’t forget that it is vital for you to find a way to rest your overloaded neck muscles.

When you sit or lay down, use pillows or cushions to support your head so your neck muscles can relax and rest.

Low back pain

Unfortunately, few effective treatments exist for this common pain disorder. Let’s list some of them:

  • Painkillers help in the short term but harm in the long term.
  • Chiropractic treatments: can hit or miss and are rarely an effective long-term solution.
  • Surgery: is invasive and sometimes not as effective as it seems to be.

The trick of effectiveness is to understand the source of the pain, which is likely to be the muscular system, the victim of depletion.

If you suffer from acute low back pain for less than a week, I strongly recommend Trigger Point Therapy, as it responds very well.

If you suffer this pain for an extended period, it might be more complicated as it might involve more muscle groups and might take some more time to address all the trigger points involved.

The listed muscle groups are usually involved in the majority of all low back pain disorders:

  • Quadratus Lumborum
  • Gluteus Medius
  • IlioPsoas
  • Rectus Abdominis

If the low back pain is left untreated, the previous list might increase up to ten additional muscle groups may become involved.

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Trigger Point Therapy

Relieve chronic pain and muscle tension with trigger point therapy. This targeted massage technique uses pressure to release knots in tight muscle fibres and restore optimal functioning to the affected areas.

45 Minutes / £50 – or – 60 Minutes / £60

Trigger Point Therapy

Relieve chronic pain and muscle tension with trigger point therapy. This targeted massage technique uses pressure to release knots in tight muscle fibres and restore optimal functioning to the affected areas.

45 Minutes / £50 – or – 60 Minutes / £60

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