Deep Tissue Massage & Trigger Point Therapy – Here’s What You Need to Know

Ahh, finally. Here we come, stumbling upon the most crucial question of all times.

If you’re wondering whether it has anything to do with life beginning on Earth, then nope, it doesn’t.

But it is undoubtedly related to you being able to live peacefully in good health… and let your neighbors live peacefully too by not crying out loud in pain too often in the middle of the night.

You are in pain, your back, or your butt, or neck, maybe even all of them at once… but you don’t know what to do. You think maybe a massage therapist or chiropractor could help.

You search the web but find many hocus pocus terminologies that are as easy to understand as counting the hair on your head. About 5 minutes later, you’ll be asking the ceiling & walls of your room this question:

“What’s the difference between Deep Tissue Massage

& Trigger Point Therapy For Treating Pain? !”

Let’s settle this once & for all so you know what suits you best to help you sleep all night instead of attempting to toss and turn painfully from side to side in excruciating pain.

Deep Tissue Massage

Enough of your social media surfing now. Let me take you across the horizon to your wellbeing and delve deeper into the artistic science of anatomy of your primitive figure.

While reading through the masterful pieces about Deep Tissue Massage, I have come to know that it may be something close to sadism (minus the taking-pleasure-from-pain part). 

That’s because this is a particular massage therapy that includes applying firm pressure (as if life isn’t agonizing enough already) with gentle strokes on the skin to reach the deep-lying muscle layers and the connective tissues. 

On a serious note, Deep Tissue massage is pretty invasive & is not for everyone. This therapy is carried out for severe chronic pain and contracted parts of the body like stiff back, lower back pain, muscle tightness, and soreness in legs & shoulders. 

*Deep Tissue massage relieves stiffness and pain on the parts where where therapy is carried out, unlike the Trigger Point Therapy that relieves the referred pain.

Although this therapy results in some pain (still less than what you get in a heartbreak) & stiffness after the massage, you should still let your therapist know if the physical pain does not subside in a day or two.

Trigger Point Therapy

Here’s something a mindboggling fact which I find hard to accept. There’s a muscle in the armpit that could possibly produce pain in your wrist. The triggering of a shoulder muscle may cause pain in your neck or head. 

Now stop squinting and widening your eyes because this is true. 

Certain neurologically active bands of tissues in our body produce predictable pain patterns in other parts of the body upon applying pressure. That’s the crux of trigger point therapy. A headache may fail to get treated with medication because its root cause could be a muscle in the shoulder.

On a lighter note, the next time your wrist hurts, checking your armpit for any symptoms would be a good idea.

*Trigger Point Therapy eases the pinched muscles & nerves and relieves the referred pain in the body, a markedly different technique than Deep Tissue Massage.

This therapy is not a massage and may not directly address the body parts in pain. Therapists release the trigger points through neuromuscular techniques and stretching. It helps in increasing the blood flow to boost the immune system. 

Which Technique Is Better For You?

If you are in pain and believe you may need such therapies, talk to a licensed massage therapist, or chiropractor to decide which massage technique could work out better in your situation. I’d suggest you don’t try to decide what’s best for yourself in this case. Otherwise, you could be adding one more thing to the list of screw-ups in life.

Acupressure vs Trigger Point Therapy