Why Can Deep Tissue Massage Make Me Sore?

For your muscles, getting a deep-tissue massage is similar to experiencing a tough workout. They got stretched and manipulated during the session, and the massage increased blood circulation to your tight spots. The lining of our muscles is supposed to be smooth, and work fluidly.

When a certain group of muscles gets tight, strained or kinked, it becomes more rigid, and will rely on surrounding muscle areas to pitch in and help. During a massage, the therapist works to stretch, lengthen, and break up groups of muscles (commonly known as knots), possibly causing tiny micro tears in the muscle along the way.
This is a normal function of massage, and while it leads to more blood flow and healing to that area, it can also lead to that day-after tenderness. 

So it is actually ok to experience this after-treatment soreness.


What can you do to reduce this after treatment soreness?

• Take a bath with epsom salts in the evening on the day of the massage- soak for about 20-40 min. This will warm all your muscles up and they will soak up the magnesium (epsom salts) which will help to relax the muscles more.

 

• Drink some fluid (water is best)

 

• Do some gentle stretching, paying attention to the areas worked on during your massage and maybe go for a walk to keep everything moving.

The soreness experienced by some people (not everyone by the way) is normal and part of getting your body better. This usually only happens when you are either not used to having deep tissue massage treatments or you haven’t been in a while (so you have lots of tightness in your muscles again).

Generally this after soreness is only experienced after the first few massage sessions and will not occur when you become a regular client having monthly (or more frequent) visits.