Are you experiencing shoulder pain? How about chest pain, upper back or upper arm pain?
The shoulder is a highly mobile joint that can be overused from everyday activities and exercises that can strain the area. It’s helpful to track down all the culprits to get to the source of the issue.
I teach clients how to treat pain by using techniques only a massage therapist would know. There is a pattern to pain and when you know the secrets of referred pain, trigger points, and massage therapy, the power is in your hands.
In this video I’m going to show you easy, powerful, self-therapy techniques to find relief from shoulder pain, chest pain, upper back pain, upper arm pain.
My book, How to Heal Your Body, goes into detail on how to treat these painful symptoms. The book also covers many other pain symptoms including head pain, neck pain, TMJ, headaches, migraines, back pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain, and much more. We use an easy to use spiky massage ball as a self-therapy tool. Both are available at TomSpiros.com. I’m also available for online coaching.
Massage should always be practiced first to eliminate tight muscles or trigger points. You can further injure your body if you attempt to stretch or strengthen a problematic muscle. After you have practiced massage, then you can follow up with stretching or an exercise routine.
When practicing self-therapy, we use a spiky massage ball along with our body weight to apply pressure. The spiky nodules are perfect to provide the kneading necessary for deep tissue massage. You may feel slight pain when pressing on a trigger point, that is ok. Trigger points hurt when pressed, but massage is the only way to treat them. When we locate a tight muscle apply pressure for 30 seconds or so then move along. On a scale of 1-10 where 1 is no pressure and 10 is too much, keep the pressure around 7 for healing to occur.
We always wear a few layers of clothes and a hoodie to protect the skin. Pressure marks may appear from the deep pressure but, they will fade away shortly.
Diagnosis for pain here is labeled as arthritis, bursitis, tendonitis, rotator cuff injury, or frozen shoulder. Trigger points and muscle weakness are normally the real sources of dysfunction. When massage therapy takes the pain away and allows the muscles to function properly, it’s easy to see for yourself.
Tight muscles or trigger points in the scalenes, rotator cuff muscles, upper back, chest, and upper arm are the sources for shoulder dysfunction.
I’ll show you the muscles and how to treat them in this video.