Are you one of the millions of people suffering from constant muscle aches and pains? Common problem areas include your upper/lower back, neck, hips, glutes and thighs. You try everything, yet the muscles remain sore.
If this sounds like a familiar scenario, then you’ll benefit from learning about trigger points. We’ll explain what they are in this post, as well as detailing why you should focus on them to ease chronic muscle soreness.
Trigger Points Explained
A trigger point is an area of your muscle that becomes tight and taught. This can happen due to chronic tightness or repetitive use, but it can also come about from muscle injuries. Either way, you’ve got an area of your muscle that’s very tender and causes an achy pain.
If you can deal with this trigger point and make it go away, your pain should follow suit. Your muscles will no longer feel knotted and bunched up, allowing you to experience that rare sense of relief!
How Do You Ease Sore Muscles By Targeting Trigger Points?
Ah, this is where people go wrong. You feel a pain or tightness in your muscles and your instinct is to stretch. Stretching can help bring some relief – and everyone should add stretches to their daily self-care routine – but it won’t necessarily deal with trigger points. It’s better to stretch after trying some of these trigger point techniques:
- Trigger Point Massaging – You can go to a massage therapist or do this yourself using various home massage tools. Locate the trigger point in your muscle and apply pressure to the area. Move around a bit, but the idea is to use pressure to massage and almost melt away the trigger point. Often, you only need a few seconds or minutes of pressure on one trigger point for it to fade.
- Dry Needling – This technique is regularly confused with acupuncture, but dry needling is specifically geared towards targeting trigger points. Please get this done by professionals as it involves inserting special needles through the skin to hit your muscular trigger points. This stimulates blood flow to the area and encourages the muscles to relax and stop bunching up. Regular treatments will help trigger points subside for good.
- Heat Therapy – Much like dry needling and massaging, heat therapy focuses on improving the blood flow in your problem area. Heat causes more blood to fill the muscle and circulate, which can help unlock tight areas and calm down trigger points.
Realistically, we can’t say which of these tactics will work the best for you. Our advice is to speak with a professional and get proper help with your muscular trigger points. Find ways to target these sore areas and your muscle soreness should slowly abide.
But remember, the trigger points will come back if you keep doing things that aggravate your muscles. Always try to figure out the cause of your pain in the first place. When you understand what it is, you can work on preventing it from causing more pain in the future.
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