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What is Remedial Massage Therapy?
Unlike a regular massage or a full body deep tissue massage, Remedial Therapy focuses on one or two specific concerns, and uses advanced techniques to assess injuries, and treat these areas.
Remedial Massage Therapists work through specific assessments to create treatment plans for injury or mobility recovery. Remedial Therapists are trained to know and understand anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology. We treat muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascia to help reduce pain from injury and assist in your rehabilitation.
Listed below are some of the assessments or manual therapy techniques we may implement during your treatment. Please note that during a treatment we will be checking in with you to ensure that we are working with your personal wants/needs (not everybody likes the idea of dry needling or functional release cupping for example, and this is okay!)
Trigger points are the tight, irritable nodules that form in the muscle or fascia (what most people know as knots). These points can cause pain, muscle tension, restricted movement, and referral pain. Trigger point therapy involves putting pressure on these trigger points for an amount of time, which releases them. This can be a little tender to start off with, but the sensation eases off as the muscle releases. Most people describe this as a "good hurt" as they can feel the benefits of the release during and almost instantly after.
Myofascial Release is a technique used to treat the connective tissue that surrounds your muscles – called the fascia! Fascia is super important for movement, so when it is tight or has experienced adhesions, it can cause pain or restriction in movement. Myofascial Release involves working with the top connective tissue layer primarily, so it doesn't feel very deep. This is also a great technique after surgery, as surgeons cut through fascia tissue to get where they need to go.
Dry needling is the treatment of trigger points. Trigger points are the tight, irritable nodules that form in the muscle or fascia (what most people know as knots). These points can cause pain, muscle tension, restricted movement, and referral pain. Trigger point dry needling involves inserting a sterile, very thin, single-use needle right into a trigger point. Most trigger points can be released using hand pressure, however when the point is very deep or stubborn, needling may be a more effective option. Dry needling is very safe when done by a trained professional (that's us!).
Deep tissue massage is a common technique that can be used in your treatment. It involves a firm pressure and slower strokes to treat tension in the deeper layers of muscle and fascia. In a remedial treatment, this may also be performed to prepare your muscles to receive other techniques such as dry needling or trigger point therapy.
Taping can be done with rigid tape, or kinesio tape (Rocktape). Rigid tape restricts movement in a joint that has previously been injured to avoid sustaining further damage. Kinesio Tape or Rocktape has more stretch, allowing more movement, and its benefits lay in how it can decompress injury sites, promote blood flow and healing. Kinesio tape also enables proprioception (touch receptors in your skin) to switch on muscles or responses from your body - getting your own body to use the right muscles at the right time. Taping can be used for injuries, swelling, pain management, sports or for postural reasons.
Joint mobilisation is an advanced technique involving small, gentle movements applied to a joint in a desired direction when it may be stuck or stiff. The purpose of mobilising a joint is to regain movement and reduce pain. This can be done by hand or with a purpose-made belt.
Functional Release Cupping differs from the traditional methods of cupping, in the way we move the cups, or we get you to move with the cups on! At first this may feel a little weird, but after the treatment it feels amazing! It works to stretch and hydrate the fascia in one or more parts of that fascial line (fascia that is connected throughout the body - you have 4 of these lines or "chains"). This helps restore pain free movement and/or increase your range of motion. The only downside- it may leave you with a few marks from the cups, but this goes away after a few days.
Getting hands-on treatment is great for your body and, sometimes that may be all you need. Our commitment is that you are getting better as quickly as possible. So, in cases of injury, postural or movement dysfunction, or reoccurring pain, doing some exercises will help strengthen those areas. These exercises will assist your long-term recovery and the prevention of a recurring injury.
Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) and Muscle Energy Technique (MET) are advanced stretching techniques that we can perform to help you safely stretch and increase your mobility, even during the rehab process of an injury.
Manual Lymphatic Drainage is a specialised technique used to treat lymphoedema, acute swelling, swollen limbs, fluid retention, sluggish lymphatic systems, and other symptoms. The treatment feels very different to a usual remedial treatment. It is very soft and slow to encourage the natural drainage of lymph fluid, the body carries waste products to the lymph nodes to be processed and eliminated. This treatment supports the body’s lymph nodes to function naturally.
Good posture means more than sitting up straight. It starts from your feet and travels up through your knees, hips, and entire spine. We want to improve your posture for the long term. Muscles play a large role in affecting your posture. If muscles are tight, they can pull the bones that they are attached to in a different direction to where they operate best. The same goes if muscles are weakened. This can allow those bones to be pulled by other muscles, placing the joints under a lot of strain. A postural analysis can look at the whole body, or where your area of concern is to determine where postural dysfunction may lie, which muscles are overactive/tight and which muscles are underactive/weak. This can help formulate our treatment plan and exercise prescription to improve your posture for the long term.
For our body to move effectively, we need good range of motion through our joints. Without it we make compensation patterns we may not always be aware of. We can test your range of motion to figure out which structures or muscles are limiting your movement or causing your pain.
A good muscle balance is essential to maintaining a good posture and injury-free life. Sometimes, due to previous injury, our sedentary lifestyles, compensation patterns or jobs or sports requiring repetitive movements, we can develop an imbalance in muscle strength. This can be in relation to the left and right sides of our body, or antagonistic muscle pairs (for one muscle to contract, its antagonistic pair must relax). We can test your muscle strength and give you the appropriate treatment and exercise to improve this
