I took an online massage class this week about massage therapy increasing athletic performance. Very interesting stuff! I know, you might think that one cannot take an online course in massage therapy, but you'd be surprised!
We all know that trigger points can refer pain... Backing up: trigger points are areas or points in our tissue are hyper-facilitated or hyper-irritated. Imagine you've had a rough day at work and then in your commute home numerous people cut you off, and it's hot and humid and you have no air conditioning, and when you get home there's chaos...and you feel like you just can't take it anymore...and so you may take out your frustration on someone who really doesn't deserve it. That's sort of how a muscle with a trigger point feels--like it's over-worked or under-nurtured and it's at it's wits end.
A common experience we can all relate to is what we experience as a headache if often referral of pain from the muscles at the back of the head and neck. Trigger points can be active (produce and/or refer pain) and latent. Latent trigger points may produce or refer pain when they are pressed or stimulated, but they may just cause muscle weakness. Early in the development of a trigger point, it causes muscle weakness. Ah ha! Perhaps in part, this is why, after many days of running (I'm a runner) with no massage (or yoga) to break it up my routine, I will feel sometimes like I have logs for legs. Do you have this feeling? Like gravity is just keeping you down and you can't move the way you sometimes feel you can? Maybe that tired feeling people blame on getting older is an accumulation of trigger points that are causing muscle weakness? I'm just speculating.
But here's the super-interesting and frustrating part: As neck muscle trigger points can refer pain into the head and give us a headache, trigger points can also refer muscle weakness into other parts of the body. This I did not know, or if I did, I forgot about. That muscle weakness can be referred. Some of the muscles that have been specifically studied: trigger points in the QL (low back muscle) can cause weakness in the gluteus maximus (the big butt muscle we use for things like walking up stairs), and trigger points in the infraspinatus (back of the shoulder blade muscle) cause weakness in the anterior deltoid (front of the shoulder).
So, say you think you have have a weak hamstring. Do you? Or do you have trigger points in your hamstring making it weak? Or do you have trigger points somewhere else referring into your hamstring making it weak? Intellectually interesting, but practically frustrating, if it is your hamstring.
What to do? Well, I'm still exploring this, but a good, thorough full body massage always seems like a good place to start. Find all the areas that seem to feel bound up, constricted, adhered. If the problem isn't where you think it is, touch on everything and see what improves and what areas maintain their problem status and go from there. And refer to common trigger point referral patterns for inspiration about where the problem may be coming from.
Be in touch,
Mary
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