Rebalance Sports Massage & Pilates

02/04/2024

Message to book!

07/02/2024

21/01/2024

Re-sharing this to highlight the need for post c-section rehabilitation ❤️

19/01/2024

Have you had a C-Section?

Do you struggle to engage or strengthen your tummy muscles or pelvic floor?

Do you struggle with back ache?

Is your scar puckered or indented?

Do you have little sensation around your scar?

Do you have a tummy that ‘domes’ as you get up from lying down?

Are you unsure if you have diastasic rectii (split tummy muscles)

If you answered yes to any of these questions, did you know I offer complete C-Section recovery?

This includes hands-on massage therapy to relieve the scar and the surrounding area. We then can work on rehabilitating your core and pelvic floor so you can embrace your new body whilst learning how to better look after it now and in your future!

29/10/2022

There are three dimensions of pain. The sensory (the actual feeling of pain, its nature and locality), the cognitive (what we think about the pain and how interpret its meaning and context) and the affective (how we behave in reaction to it).

People’s thoughts and emotions (cognitions) can directly affect the healing of an injured tissue (Cole-King and Harding 2001). This can be due to people’s behavioural changes, other on-going lifestyle factors or by the way they view their problem.

We are designed to learn how to respond emotionally to things. Simply having the thought about something negative can lead to a physical response (e.g. increased heart rate, headache/tension in the body) and an emotional response (e.g. stress/worry/dread). Ruminating about a thought can lead to ongoing stress and fatigue. Emotional and physical responses can influence our overprotective alarm system and potentially lead to an increase in your experience of pain.

Massage therapy provides many therapeutic effects that deliver the opportunity for your body to restore calm and optimum functioning of your nervous system.  It is an effective link between the CNS and PNS (especially the autonomic nervous system) that restores nervous system balance and is a powerful step toward your long-term health and well-being.

23/10/2022

Chronic pain actually has a lot less to do with the body’s tissues, muscles, and joints than you might think. If you have experienced chronic pain you might find this impossible to believe. You feel the pain in your tissues, muscles, and/or joints, so how can it not be the root cause and how can massage help?

In order to understand this, we have to look at how the nervous system reacts to an injury. After an injury or an accident, your body can go into a state that is commonly referred to as “fight-or-flight” mode. When you enter in this state your body releases the stress chemicals adrenalin and cortisol. These stress chemicals have the purpose of communicating to the brain that you are in danger and that action is required. Once you are safe again, the fight or flight mode is meant to “turn-off”, and thus stop producing stress hormones.

However, in people who develop chronic and persistent pain these stress chemicals often don’t stop being produced and this “fight or flight” mode continues. This causes an issue for the body because these hormones are only meant to be activated for small periods of time in order to produce a physical response.

When a person continuously operates in “fight or flight” mode as a result of a painful injury, the brain is being told that the person is still not safe. This means that the brain still views the injury as needing attention and continues to amplify the pain. The continuous stress chemicals being released cause the nervous system to become highly sensitised.

This means that your brain is constantly looking for a threat and thus remains stressed. The mind worries and perceives danger in events that would normally be unreasonable or unlikely to perceive a threat from.

Normal movement can become stressful as you now consider it to be extremely painful. You may then become more inactive. This can cause you to feel hopeless because you are living in a state with persistent pain and anxiety with no alleviation of your symptoms.

Massage can help with the soft tissue tension alongside simple breathing techniques to help with the down regulation of the nervous system.

23/07/2022

Why is working on scars so important?

The more research is being done on fascia and scar tissue, the more we are seeing that scars can dramatically affect how our body functions.

Have a look at Fascia & The Mystery of Chronic Pain | Dana Sterling | LIFE TALK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v54l3wDTJHg (if short on time skip to 8mins to see demo on a restriction created in the hip area) and imagine how much an abdominal scar will affect your WHOLE body function… including your breathing!! Its HUGE!!

So…

If you have had a C-Section…this therapy is for YOU!

If you have had a Hysterectomy…this is for YOU!

If you have had a tummy tuck…this is for YOU!

If you have had any abdominal surgery…this is for YOU!

01/06/2022

Most people assume that lower back pain rehab exercises need to be very specific. However this is based on outdated research on pain science.

We used to think of pain as being the result of a certain part of the body not working properly and prescribe exercises alter those muscles. Nowadays, science has proven that pain is a lot more complex and many factors affect pain such as inflammation, genetics, sleep, stress, general physical activity.

Studies have shown that heavy deadlifting (Berglund, L 2016) has been shown to help with low back pain. As has pilates, walking, strengthening, breathing exercises and spinal fusion surgery! The point being that no specific exercise or targeting of specific muscles is now thought to be better for rehabilitation of lower back pain…it’s ultimately one that the individual enjoys and will be consistent with.

Exercise can help lower back pain by:

Reducing systemic inflammation
Reducing stress
Improving sleep
Providing social interaction
Improving mental health
and many many more ways!

📷

07/04/2022

What is the difference between mobility & flexibility?

Flexibility generally refers to how much passive range of motion you have as well as the ability of your soft tissue (muscles) to stretch.

Mobility refers to the range of motion around a joint. That’s why flexibility is part of mobility – the muscles around a joint need to be flexible enough for the joint to move through a full range.

Mobility is also about having strength within your flexibility. It refers to your ability to take your body through a full range of movement with control and good form.

Which one do you need to focus on?

This depends on your goals and your current strengths and weaknesses. I feel working on flexibility alone is rarely beneficial. Being able to do the splits isn’t much use unless you’re a gymnast or a dancer

Mobility, on the other hand, is beneficial to most people. That’s because having control over your flexibility means you are less likely to get injured and it can help protect your joints. It’ll also mean you get more from your regular strength training programme.

To work on your mobility, focus on exercises that build on stability and strength through a full range of movement.

02/03/2022

Good reaction to dry needling today with an Elite marathon running client.

Dry Needling provides a fast effective route to pain relief, through the use of fine needles inserted into trigger points in muscles. The needles pe*****te deep into ‘knots’ of muscles, to relieve tension and increase blood flow to the region. They can hit stubborn knots with precision, even when the source of pain seems to be buried so deep as to be inaccessible to massage.

28/01/2022

C-Section scars play a huge role in creating mobility, muscle, fascia and nerve dysfunction in our bodies.

Scar tissue/adhesions keep growing so year on year, scars can increasingly impact a woman's health and movement.

The importance of the lifetime care of the scar is often overlooked or attention is just given to the scar on the surface.

Every woman both needs and deserves on-going care for their scars which can contribute to back pain, bowel dysfunction and menstrual dysfunction yet this is rarely discussed.

If you’d like a chat regarding your abdominal scar, drop me a message and I’ll call you back.