The Benefits of Realignment: Massage Therapy for Feet and Ankles

Your feet are your foundation for upright posture: Invest in massage therapy for your feet and ankles!

Very often someone will ask me: if I could only have one area of my own body worked on, which one would I choose? And more or less always, I respond that I would choose massage therapy for feet and ankles.

Surprised? So are most of the people who ask! But I can’t think of any part of my body that has worked harder than my feet and ankles. Stints in pointe shoes and training for marathons immediately come to mind as the biggest demands I’ve placed on them. But still, they support me as I walk at least 10,000 steps every day up and down the New York City streets.

But even if I’d never danced or run competitively, or walked as much as I do, my feet and ankles are still the foundation for the entire weight of my body. They absorb information from the ground so that the nervous system can create standing posture all the way up the skull. And if something is less optimal with your feet and ankles, your posture will change to compensate. Just imagine what would happen if there were a problem or weakness in the foundation of a building. Similarly, issues in the feet and ankles can lead to a cascade of dysfunctions throughout the body. Massage therapy for feet and ankles can create profound improvements in our posture and movement.

More Information: Massage Therapy New York

Deep Tissue Massage For Injury? When It’s Great and When to Wait!

New Yorkers & our “no pain, no gain” mentalities…which often get us into trouble

A deep tissue massage for your injury will most likely do wonders. However, before getting a deep tissue massage, we need to analyze what kind of injury you’re dealing with. And what stage of injury would allow for it. Better safe than sorry!

Deep Tissue Massage for Injury 101

First let’s make it clear what deep tissue work is. In a nutshell, its a type of massage for injury that is specific and intentional. The strokes are slower and applied with more pressure. This is to target deeper layers of muscles and connective tissue. It’s a massage modality used more often to ease muscle tension and/or improve range of motion… And generally used to alleviate injuries in a chronic stage vs the acute stage.

What is a chronic injury vs. an acute injury? Glad you asked!

What’s chronic pain?

Chronic injuries develop gradually and have existed for months or even years. The pain can go through periods of remission. And come back in unpleasant episodes. Chronic pains exist for long periods of time if the root cause is not properly addressed or treated.

For example, chronic neck pain and shoulder pain is super common. And usually occurs when your job has you sitting in front of your computer 5x a week for 8 hours at a time. There are times where you’re so used to being in low level pain, you don’t even acknowledge it. Sound familiar?

We don’t expect you to be able to quit your job to address your chronic pain. However, allowing this type of discomfort to stagnate will only get worse with time. And even have a ripple effect on the body’s soft tissues. This can cause postural deviations and/or referral pain elsewhere in your body. For chronic pain, we recommend a series of deep tissue massages to discover and deal with the root causes. Such as an older injury that never healed properly.

Once your chronic pain goes away we recommend regularly scheduled deep tissue massage sessions about every 6-8 weeks to keep pain from coming back.

What’s Acute Pain?

Acute conditions are anything but cute! The pain usually is the direct result of an explicit and memorable incident. For example, pain from “rolling” your ankle trying to catch the subway. Or sharp lower back pain after that one extra deadlift rep. The acute stage of an injury is generally the first 48-72 hours after the injury. Even the slightest movement after the injury can be very painful. Also, acute injuries associated with joints, muscles, tendons or ligaments can have swelling, redness and very limited range of motion.

Probably not ideal to get a deep tissue massage in the acute injury phase but, rule out massage altogether? Not so fast…

Deep tissue techniques on the injured area may actually cause further injury! However, a massage that facilitates muscle or joint healing is great for getting you on the right track towards recovery. A knowledgeable massage therapist will mix in lighter swedish style strokes to the injury area. These promote muscle relaxation, and promote faster healing by increasing blood flow to the injury. And in turn removing excess fluid and waste from the injury site.

It won’t magically make the injury go away, but should increase the ability to move through it, put more weight on it, and heal faster. When you can move easier, you’ll increase you own body’s ability to heal itself.

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How To Find a Chiropractor or Acupuncturist During The Holidays

David Weintraub, LMT & Owner at Bodyworks DW, writes about how to find effective pain management when you are traveling away from NYC. Read below!

What do you do when your back goes out and you are away from home?!

If you are reading this, odds are you are in New York City. And quite possibly already a happy massage therapy client at our studio. We think our blogs are relevant and important info. But we’d be fooling ourselves if we thought that Google would show them much outside of our home turf, NYC. For many of you, you already know what to do when you back (or other area) goes out of whack. Book a massage with our team of talented therapists for back pain massage in the New York area! When you are out of NYC, we recommend working with a chiropractor or acupuncturist instead. And we’ll show you how to find a good chiropractor or acupuncturist! Travel is tough on our bodies. And holidays with family can often add even more stress into the picture. It’s not at all uncommon for injuries to crop up while away from home. There are a lot of possible causes: 

• Different mattresses and pillows than you are used to
• Long plane flights crammed into uncomfortable seats
• Eating foods outside your normal diet
• Being thrown into other people’s schedule
• Your uncle/aunt/mother/grandfather asking you repeatedly why you haven’t gotten married/had kids/gotten a promotion/found a partner/insert existential dread here…..

Counterintuitively, we don’t recommend getting a massage if you are away from NYC and in real pain. Before we show you how to find a chiropractor or acupuncturist instead, we need to tell you why!

Why we recommend chiropractic care or acupuncture instead of massage while out of New York

If you are just feeling sore and tired from a long flight, by all means go ahead and book a massage at a spa nearby. Most massage therapists around the country, and frankly the world, have enough training to provide a decent relaxing full body massage. However, if you are in real pain, you need to make sure you find someone who has the training and experience to help you. New York State massage therapists have much higher education requirements that most other states. New York requires a minimum of 1000 hours of training to complete school and get a license. Most other states only require between 500-700 hours. That extra 300-500 hours of training makes a real difference. Between being able to provide medical massage vs a spa massage. Of course, it’s totally possible that you will end up with someone great and experienced, but it can be a gamble.

Massage Therapy does not have national standards. So don’t count on other states having therapists at the level you are used to in New York!

There is no national standard for massage therapy (yet). There are minimum national requirements for chiropractors and acupuncturists. Both disciplines routinely deal with pain management. If you find someone with a decent number of 5 star reviews on Google, you’ll likely walk away with less pain. While there is still no way to guarantee you’ll get what you need the odds are higher. And if you follow our guide on how to find a chiropractor or acupuncturist, you’ll have an even greater chance of walking out pain free. In states with lower requirements for massage therapy, you’ll have to rely solely on recommendations and reviews. And on their having taking advanced training courses. These courses often use language that is hard to decipher. If you aren’t up on the latest terms (pediatric oncology massage, traditional kinesiology, etc….anyone?) it will be hard to tell what you are getting.

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5 Reasons to Make Massage Your Monthly Routine

There are a lot of great reasons to make massage therapy in New York a regular part of your self-care routine. Massage has tons of benefits!

Here are our top 5...

Alleviate Pain

Working late nights while sitting in front of the computer for hours is a surefire recipe for muscle imbalance. When the body is overworked it aches all over. Left untreated, this will lead to chronic pain. There is almost nothing worse than feeling pain, stiffness and achiness. Especially on a cold day!!!

Many of us live with pain in today's high demanding society, especially in busy cities like New York. Eventually your body maxes out your pain threshold. For most, that's when you’ll break down and visit a professional, such as a massage therapist in New York, acupuncturist, physical therapist, or chiropractor.

By making massage therapy part of a regular routine, you can help get ahead of the curve and prevent chronic pain from building up. Try switching your mindset. Instead of only getting massage therapy in New York when you have a major acute issue, schedule preventative monthly massage. You’ve been pushing so hard at work...don’t you deserve a nice massage?

Relieve stress and anxiety 

In today’s modern world there are more stressors than ever. We are getting less sleep and staying up longer due to work deadlines, children, school, family issues, environmental issues.

Massage can be a great to decrease stress and anxiety. Bonus...this will help your body’s other systems like digestion and immunity function better. Massage therapy can help engage the parasympathetic nervous system (your “rest and digest” system) which your body needs to go to to restore.

Your parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite of your sympathetic nervous system (your “fight or flight” system). The sympathetic nervous system prepares your body for stressful situations. It pumps you with adrenaline and increases your heart rate and breathing. This is very useful and necessary if you are being chased by a lion. Less so when you are stressing over that report that’s due on Friday.

As New Yorkers, we tend to stay stuck in our sympathetic nervous systems...all the time.

Which is really not good for the body in the long run. Your body doesn’t get the rest it needs to heal. Having regular massage therapy in New York restores your ability to switch back to rest mode more easily. It can help you sleep better and handle stressful situations more calmly.

Decrease Tension Headaches and Migraines

Quick fact (According to the Massage Therapist’s Guide to Pathology): "Tension headaches, by far the most common type of headache people experience (90-92%), these are triggered by muscular tension, bony misalignment, postural patterns, eyestrain, temporomandibular joint disorders.”

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Chiropractic Treatment of Shoulder Pain

Shoulder pain is a problem that many people suffer from. Some patients suffer from shoulder pain due to a sports injury, while others are diagnosed with tendinitis of the shoulder and neck. Whatever your cause for shoulder pain, the physical feelings you are experiencing can lead to difficulty in the performance of everyday activities. Your work, school or even everyday living may suffer. Thankfully, there is a solution.

With chiropractic care and shoulder pain massage New York services combined, you can find relief. Two of the most effective treatment options for shoulder pain are chiropractic care and massage therapy. Both treatments are non-invasive and provide substantial relief from pain in the shoulder area.

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Could You Benefit From a Medical Massage in New York?

It's likely you will lose mobility as you age

One of the main benefits to medical massage is increased range of motion in our joints, ie regained mobility. So, we can't really highlight the benefits of medical massage in new york without talking about the reasons we lose mobility in the first place.

As most of us age we slowly lose our mobility. We assume it’s aging, but often it’s simply sitting around too much. Office desks, driving, and sitting on the couch binge watching shows are all culprits. No matter what we do at the gym, all this sitting takes a toll. Check out this Mayo Clinic article on sitting risks.

When you sit for long periods your posture becomes misaligned. This results in poor biomechanics and mobility. Other repetitive postures such as leaning to one side while standing or carrying a bag on the same shoulder every day can also decrease mobility.

These unnatural habits limit our range of motion, speed, and power in our walking, running, and sports. Or even worse, they develop into nagging injuries preventing us from enjoying our activities. 

What is the difference between Medical Massage and a Spa Massage?

The ultimate difference is what the massage therapist chooses to focus on during the session.

In a typical spa massage, the therapist will give a full body massage rather than focusing on injuries or specifics. The goal is to provide a relaxing experience, increase blood flow, and provide general maintenance to the muscles.

In a medical massage, the focus is on functional outcomes and medical needs. These may include releasing scar tissue, increasing range of motion in joints, and helping the client learn better body mechanics.

How Does Massage Increase Mobility?

Fascia is a substance in your body which glues all of your muscles together. It can become harder due to inactivity. Or fascia can get filled with inelastic scar tissue due to injury. This often results in poor posture and limited movement. Over time you end up on a downward spiral where movement becomes more and more difficult.

Medical massage improves the elasticity of your fascia. It uses targeted deep tissue techniques to increase blood flow to stuck areas and to lengthen and stretch the fascia. By choosing which areas to work on wisely, a great medical massage therapist can rebalance your posture. And increase range of motion in your joints. You’ll find ease in your movement patterns again and feel much better, especially with a series of 5-8 massage sessions.

Get the Experts Massage You and Relieve Body Pain

The massage is a proven technique that can help one get relieved from the body pain in various parts of the body. However, it is important to have the right pressure offered by the massager on the right points else it can be a painful experience also. Hence the client needs to keep on offering feedbacks to the massager if the pressure is more or less. One can go for a deep tissue massage or a myofascial one. In the deep tissue massage the amount of pressure, as well as the use of oil, is high compared to that of the myofascial one. It is only the client who can describe if the pressure is bearable or not and accordingly the massager can increase or decrease the pressure and pace of strokes.

Post Race Recovery Sports Massage for New York City Athletes

Every racing athlete needs a routine for post race recovery: Are you are missing a vital component to your race goals?

My experience with injuries has had its ups and downs. When I do not stay committed to post race recovery, I began to experience pain. Running becomes more difficult and much more uncomfortable. I can feel myself losing range of motion in my stride, due to untreated tightness and overuse.

When we neglect to practice regular post race recovery our bodies pay a price. I have learned this lesson the hard way from experience. It’s a big reason why I became a massage therapist in addition to a personal trainer!

When I began running and increasing my mileage, the repetitive stress built up. Due to asymmetries in my running form, I started to feel pain in my right achilles tendon. This made running for me painful and very difficult.

In massage school I discovered that my hip flexors and glute muscles were overly tight. Also my glutes were not working efficiently due to a facially stuck Sartorius muscle. (Sartorius is a long balancing muscle on the front of your thigh that stabilizes the knee.) These muscle imbalances restricted my stride, creating a feedback loop where each run got tighter and tighter, producing more and more pain.