How to Ease Lower Back Pain with Deep Soft Tissue Massage

Deep Soft Tissue Massage is a phrase that gets bandied about quite a bit these days, along with trigger point release. So what does it actually mean and will it help your ease your lower back pain?

What deep soft tissue therapy is, is really just a gradual process of relaxing tense, tight, overworked muscle fibres using different types of massage techniques to encourage the muscles to ‘open up’ and allow work on the deeper muscles. The massage therapist will use more pressure than would be used for say a Swedish massage but the techniques can often be similar. If the massage hurts you then you should tell the therapist to ease off! A good therapist knows that they should always work within your tolerance levels – but it is up to you to help establish where those levels lie. Generally it is posible to gauge to some degree when you are working too strongly, but not always and working too deeply just causes the muscle to resist which is not productive.

Irritated muscles gather ‘ trigger points ‘ which you will recognise as knotty areas in your muscles, they develop in specific places which your therapist will know. They also cause specific symptoms so working to ease them out of the muscles is very beneficial. A muscle with trigger points is a muscle which is not firing on all cylinders! Deep soft tissue work applied during remedial massage will help to remove these little nuisances and get the muscle back to prime working condition.

Lower back pain can come from trigger points in a number of muscles, here in my practice in Ely, Cambs I help people get over episodes of lower back pain by identifying where their problems are, treating the cause and giving advice on how to avoid a recurrence of the problem. Lower back pain need not be a permanent feature of your life.