Sports massage for treating scar tissue

As a Sports Massage Therapist, I frequently get asked why is it so important to break down scar tissue? Scar tissue often occurs following a trauma to soft tissue structures such as muscles. But this isn’t to say that scar tissue cannot form without a trauma. Sitting at a desk for hours, weeks, years, can have a similar long term effect on the muscles.

When the body so cleverly ‘heals’ itself, it lays down a less elastic, second grade, poorly vascularised form of tissue called collagen fibres to repair the muscle. When this occurs the newly repaired area can often form and migrate into some of the surrounding undamaged fibres as it knits itself together, forming adhesions or ‘knots’ in the muscles.

When you stretch and get the feeling of a fairly specific pain in the muscle, that is probably one of these knots. For a muscle to function properly, the muscle fibres need to be able to glide along each other as they stretch and contract. If they are all stuck together the fibres cannot glide and the muscle cannot work as effectively as it should. Scar tissue, if allowed to build up, can cause significant restriction in the performance of a muscle as it has a less elastic quality. By breaking down scar tissue and adhesions through sports massage we can restore function to the muscle and relieve the subsequent pain they can cause.

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