What are Trigger Points?

Muscles can easily develop specific areas within them which are tight, aching or weak.

If you feel the muscles around your shoulder blade you will likely feel areas of tension and lumps (also known as knots).

Push into these areas and you could experience a level of pain/discomfort as you do.

There are two types of Trigger Points:

• Active trigger points where the pain is referring away to other areas and cause muscle weakness and restrict range of movement and;
• Latent trigger points where the pain isn’t referring away and is painful only under pressure.

A healthy muscle doesn’t have trigger points, but they can easily occur by overloading the muscles. This overloading can happen in many ways such as heavy lifting (weights in the gym), frequent lifting (picking up your baby or young child), tensing your muscles (stress at work or home), postural stress (working at a computer or laptop), or by fatiguing your muscles (gardening or DIY in the evenings or weekends).

How to relieve Trigger Points?

Sports and Remedial massage can treat trigger points by applying steady pressure directly to these ‘points’ for short periods of time working within the tolerance of the patient. This is repeated several times with the pressure increasing on the trigger point is re-visited as the treatment progresses. Once the trigger points have been worked on during a treatment the muscles concerned are gradually stretched and loosened thorough other massage techniques.