Are you enrolling in your massage program with aspirations of becoming a sports massage therapist? Do you thrive in high-adrenaline settings like marathons, ball games, and wrestling matches? Have you always dreamed of sports careers and how you could find one that fits? Well, then sports massage therapy is an excellent niche to pursue!
Sports massage is an advanced avenue of massage therapy as a career where your sessions will largely focus on pain and injury rather than relaxation and basic preventative health.
Sports massage careers focus primarily on soft tissue therapy and approach injuries on various parts of the body – some not traditionally associated with massage – to help increase the performance, comfort, and overall mobility of current and former athletes who put strain onto their muscle groups not experienced by the average person.
The result of having athletes on the table is often a heightened sense of appreciation for your craft. Sports massage therapists will often speak of how rewarding it is to work with those who understand their bodies deeply and often push their muscle groups to their maximum capacity - like this account of a therapist who worked the Iron Man Triathalon in 2008.
Fantasies of working as a sports massage therapist probably take you off to the London Olympics or the Yankees locker room after a World Series game. While these dreams aren’t by any means out of your grasp, you may be surprised to learn of just how many opportunities for sports massage careers exist in every city in America, for everything from college team sports to individuals who train for personal or professional reasons.
Body builders, gymnasts, dancers, and even those who work in physically demanding lines of work – like firefighting or construction – may seek sports massage to help alleviate the pain and strain they’ve put onto their bodies while meeting the demands of their vocations.
Herein lies an exciting challenge for the sports massage therapist who truly enjoys the study of the human body. Depending on the specialization of the client, you will see an array of fascinating muscle development and spectacularly healthy bodies in need of physical therapy to overcome the challenges they have put themselves through.
In addition to satisfying anatomical curiosity and developing a mastery of the art of massage, working as a sports massage therapist promises to be a career of gratification and feelings of making an impact on those you treat.
If you are receiving cranial sacral massage in the US or Western Europe, it may very well also be called Indian Head Massage Therapy. While technically these are two different things, invented by two different historical physicians, the general points of pressure and benefits are similar enough that they have become synonymous in modern culture.
With over a century of history behind both methods and growing popularity in both the East and the West, it’s difficult to imagine that (scientific proof or not) there are not those out there experiencing benefit from the method. The theory, which has been studied and documented since its inception, with neither proof nor disproof anchoring it definitively in the scientific community, is that the cranium and the sacrum move in unison. The motion of both the bones and the forced flow of cerebrospinal fluid is thought to be therapeutic and soothing to the recipient.
