How do chiropractors help with muscle tightness and soreness?
Chiropractors can help muscle pain in three ways.
- Via a reflex relaxation of muscles after manipulation
- By giving exercises to relax the muscles
- And by any soft tissue work (massage) they might do.
When dealing with muscle pain it is always important to look at the cause of the muscle soreness.
The underlying cause of muscle tightness
If you have just been stressed, or done too much exercise, massage can be very useful. (Because it is recent, and you know the cause–in both cases you have just overworked the muscles.) But if the muscle tightness is near the spine, long term or recurrent, and there is no obvious cause it’s different. In this case it’s likely that there is an underlying joint restriction causing it. In these cases massage will do very little. The spinal joints will need to be released to allow the muscles to let go.
Exercises to help muscle
Often there is a combination of stress-induced muscle tightness and joint restriction. In this case the chiropractor will release the jammed spinal joint and give you some exercises to help with the muscular component. Lightly and repetitiously stretching and contracting the muscles, especially with light resistance, can help to get the muscle spindles working properly again.
Do chiropractors massage their patients?
Some chiropractors massage their clients, but most leave massage to massage therapist. Plenty of chiropractors do a bit of therapeutic massage though (trigger point therapy) . This involves pressing on the muscle knots to relax them. It can sometimes help relax the muscles before adjusting. Other chiropractors give patients exercises to do therapeutic massage at home. (With a tennis ball for example.)
Nowadays there are more and more chiropractors that use a percussion massage gun to relax muscles before adjusting too. Are massage guns any good?
Stefan Becker
Barcelona Chiropractor