How Sports Massage & Myofascial Release treatments can help Chronic Inflammation and Pain

Inflammation is the body’s natural healing response and protective mechanism (so it part of our immune system response) and it is the first thing that happens when we are exposed to something harmful, both injuries and diseases. 

 

Upon injury or threat substances from the body’s white blood cells are released into the blood or affected tissues to protect your body from foreign invaders. This release of chemicals increases the blood flow to the area of injury or infection, and may result in redness and warmth. Some of the chemicals cause a leak of fluid into the tissues, resulting in swelling (1). 

Physical acute and specific injuries to our soft tissues, such as an ankle sprain, or a cut, can cause inflammation locally, and this inflammation naturally reduces as the healing process continues, notably subsiding in the first 3-5 days. However, sometimes healing is not able to happen and so inflammation persists, and can cause long-term chronic pain to our soft tissues and also our vital bodily organs and systems. Persistent inflammation can be caused by many different scenarios and conditions, for example returning to activities too much too soon, injury reoccurrence, osteoarthritis, auto-immune conditions, disease.


Inflammation itself is not painful but it can cause redness, swelling, heat or loss of function and so may stimulate our pain processing receptors, called nociceptors, and hence cause pain.

3 types of Musculoskeletal Pain

There are 3 types of musculoskeletal pain:

Nociceptive
Neuropathic
Nociplastic


Nociceptive Pain - Constant stimulation of the nociceptors causes sustained stress on our body and mind and so our normal self-protecting immune system becomes stressed and does not function properly, causing a constant chronic inflammatory response. This can cause a continuous cycle of persistent and sometimes increased pain and it may spread, as our body is one continuous 3D tensile structure and overtime the feeling of “thickness, spreads like a pull in a sweater or stocking”(2) or pain can wander and travel through the body. Consequently our flexibility and spontaneity of movement are lost, setting up the body for more trauma, pain and limitation of movement.


Neuropathic Pain - sometimes we experience nerve pain (neuropathic) as our nerves are actually physically damaged or impinged owing to soft tissue inflammation.


Nociplastic Pain - nerves can mostly heal, but they can also become and remain over-sensitised and continue to cause local and multifocal pain even when the soft tissues are healed. This is called central sensitisation or nociplastic pain - and it can occur in combination with a local pain or injury or in isolation. This type of pain is now being used to explain Fibromyalgia and explain some long-term Covid symptoms.

Chronic Inflammation

The extent and effects of chronic inflammation and chronic pain vary person to person (as pain is an output of the brain and hence an individual experience) and also varies with the causes of the injury, the condition or disease and the ability of the body to repair and overcome damage.


Treating chronic pain and positively changing the natural inflammatory and hence healing cycle is a balanced game of decreasing pain levels and increasing mobility and hence encouraging healing.

Massage Therapy to help treat Inflammation and Chronic Pain

Frequent treatments is the key component to changing chronic inflammatory patterns

In my experience I have found the key component to changing chronic inflammatory patterns is the frequency of Massage treatments. 

When treatments are more frequent, I observe that inflammation could be reduced enough so there is a window of opportunity to enable my Clients to feel better and to move freer and more.


Positive Sensory Touch Input

The sensory input from Massage, both from touch and movement (see the Power of Touch article), positively influences the sensory receptors, including our nociceptors (remember the pain receptors) of the nervous system. They respond positively to gentle and considerate touch and the movement of the soft tissues and joints with Massage and Myofascial Release techniques that could result in a reduction of our pain experience.

Massage can reduce muscle guarding enabling greater pain free movement and enable us to feel more energy and vitality, and experience better sleep, and stimulate the healing process. This can all reduce symptoms of pain, depression, anxiety, and improve our function mentally and physically.

Reducing Inflammation

Research is showing that the positive touch stimulus and physical manipulation of the soft tissues from Massage and Myofascial Release could reduce inflammation, both acute inflammation from a sporting and activity recovery perspective and also chronic inflammation giving the body a chance to rest, recover and heal. So Post-event Massage is useful to enhance the healing process and hence a quicker recovery period, plus for chronic inflammation Massage stimulates the healing process.

The research (3) suggests that Massage could do this by increasing circulation of the blood and lymphatic systems, reducing inflammatory by attenuating the production of inflammatory cytokines (4), which are proteins, that help control inflammation.

Each and every person I treat is an individual with individual objectives, needs and presentations and so every treatment is individual.

If you have any questions on any of the above or how I can contact you or someone you know please contact me.

Nicky Holbrook

Sports Massage & Remedial Therapist & Advanced Clinical Myofascial Release Therapist.
January 2025

References:
1. https://www.webmd.com/arthritis/understanding-arthritis-inflammation
2. John Barnes, 1990, Myofascial Release
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7739334/ and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3975781/
4. https://www.hfe.co.uk/sports-massage/articles/massage-therapy-and-inflammation/