When Relaxing Muscle Too Much is a Bad Idea

When is getting a #massage for a tight area a bad idea? This has many answers one of the most common concerns I have because of my years of experience and training is why is that area tight first not necessarily how am I going to solve the problem. The reason is often that the body is trying to protect or is attempting to compensate for something else and this requires tightening up areas of tissue when other areas are weak or damaged and need to heal. I tell people very often it's similar to telling people there's scaffolding on the building so that people can work with it in the bodies and all the different in that sometimes it creates structure and sometimes we need to leave that structure that's compensating for something healing alone. And then moves us into something that I refer to as diagnostic palpation, this is simply trying to read the tissue and interpret what the soft tissue might be doing while the bodies in a particular position or what appears to be abnormal due to a whole range of possibilities and deciding whether the area should be worked on over the area should be left alone. 

The most common thing that I tend to see is someone has a slipped disc or #nerve impingement in the #spine. When the things occur I tend to look for if the erector tissue has also tightened up and perhaps even the iliocostalis muscles on the same side of the body or the other you may also find a small Area of tightness in the abdominal cavity which could all be a sign of compensation. This means in terms of healing that the body is trying to protect we're trying to create infrastructure around the wallet area or exhausted area or a tight area in order to deal with something else. Sometimes we're better off to look for those things in multiple places to verify that what we're saying makes sense and if it doesn't it's a sign that perhaps it's time to refer you out to a medical professional for additional testing.