Sports Massage Certification

A variety of educational venues offer sports massage "certification." Some certifications can be obtained upon the completion of two weekend seminars. Such programs acquaint you with the basic upper body and lower body sports injuries commonly found in athletes. Others programs require 80 hours of instruction, while some require serious long-term, in-depth study. As with other forms of education, your payoff will equal your investment.

National certification in massage is something very different than academic or educational certification. Thirty states and the District of Columbia now license professional massage therapists, and the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork offers a certification exam to massage therapists who have completed at least 600 hours of classroom instruction in massage. Wholehealthmd.com suggests that a sports massage therapist should aim for NCTBMB certification and have at least 50 additional hours of training in sports massage.

An Hour of Prevention Worth Months of Cure

Once you've recovered your vigor, you'll see sports massage as essential to your optimum performance and overall health. Maintenance sports massage prevents injuries by keeping you mobile while making sure that the small kinks and compensations don't set in. Maintenance massage enhances training, reduces pre-event jitters, and aids post-event recovery. While my personal preference runs to deep tissue work, you can get sports massage therapy from many branches of massage. Swedish massage emphasizes muscle-work. Trigger point massage uses accupressure-style therapy to reduce spasm and release stiffness in connective tissue. Lymphatic massage encourages the body's removal of edema and reduces swelling. If you routinely include massage in your athletic regimen, regardless of the form of sports massage you choose, you'll see a boost in your performance, and perhaps extend the overall life of your athletic career.

Though I don't play tennis, I do get a tennis-elbow-like injury from too many hours at the laptop. My Rolfer can rid me of that excruciating elbow pain and inability to twist my forearm with a few deft moves. I've been through the sequences of both Rolfing and Hellerwork and remain amazed at the power of structural reintegration to make striking changes in a single session. However, you don't need the power of Rolfing to nip injuries in the bud. Ongoing sports massage can keep you on the field and off the sidelines.

Rewriting Your Body's History

If you've had an injury in the past and you didn't have massage therapy at the time, your body changed structurally to accommodate and protect the injured area. Consequently, you still carry that injury with you as scar tissue or as patterns of inflexibility where the connective tissue or fascia have shortened and literally stuck together. Structural reintegration or deep tissue work--Rolfing, Hellerwork--can correct these longstanding body imbalances by lengthening the connective tissue holding onto these ancient rigidities.

Deep tissue work breaks down scar tissues and returns mobility to the fascia (myofascia, hence myotherapy), releasing old injuries and releasing long-carried physical trauma. Thus, structural reintegration is a powerful physical and emotional experience for practitioner and client alike. And psychically as well, if you're sensitive to such things. In my case, though I was a marathon runner and had run marathon distance a dozen times, my injuries finally happened at the site of my decades-old tailbone injury. Rolfing helped me heal.

Benefits of Sports Massage

According to sportsinjuryclinic.net, sports massage can heal both your body and your mind. Massage "helps remove waste products such as lactic acid and encourage the muscles to take up oxygen and nutrients which help them recover quicker." If you've achieved the "hard body" so esteemed in athletic culture, you haven't done yourself any favor, since your inelastic tissues may actually block your athletic growth. Again, sports massage can stretch the tissue and restore circulation, reinvigorating your training.

Those of you who've been injured training for an important event know how injury can impact your mental toughness. The "What ifs" cloud your training once you've had a sports injury before a critical event. Sports massage interrupts the cycle of anxiety that dogs post-recovery training. Massage restores confidence, as it aids physical recovery.

Training Means Stretching Your Limits

Body awareness guru Thérèse Bertherat insists that your body is the house that you and you alone occupy, yet it's a house to which you've lost the key. The metaphor is striking, especially when you're an athlete who prides yourself on knowing your body. If you've done any serious training, though, you'll have to admit that you sometimes learned your body's boundaries by crossing them. You got injured, you recovered from your injuries, and then, hopefully, you trained more consciously.

Like television's six million dollar man, injured athletes hope for the best: to rebuild themselves better than they were before. To come back "better . . . stronger . . . faster," as the voice from that program so famously intoned. In fact, with the help of sports massage, the recovering body experiences optimum healing, and the recovered body can be stronger than before the injury.

Sports Massage Training

Unlike spa-style massage more generally, therapeutic massage--and the sub-field of sports massage--include those forms of massage geared for health management and rehabilitation. Massage therapists must be able to diagnose and treat muscle, soft tissue, and joint disorders. Many, many programs offer training in professional therapeutic massage, leading to diplomas, A.S. degrees or, more rarely, a bachelor's degree. Specialized forms of massage, like Rolfing, have their own training institutes.

Many massage schools include sports massage classes within their more generic massage degree programs. In fact, it's hard to find a massage therapy program that doesn't have at least one unit on sports massage. Today, however, it's possible to get a degree or 200-hour advanced certificate in Orthopedic and Sports Massage. The latter covers topics like inflammation and soft tissue trauma, neurovascular compression syndromes, and upper and lower extremity injuries-- topics essential to athletics and sports massage.

Sport activity in adolescence: associations with health perceptions and experimental behaviours

Despite the relevance of this research topic from a public health perspective, there is currently a lack of objective data on European adolescents' sport activity, notably the associations between their sport habits and their health attitudes and behaviours, which may have important consequences both in terms of somatic (cardiovascular) health and mental health. The objective of the present study was to determine the direction and strength of the associations between the frequency of sport and health variables; in particular, perceptions of health, self image, substance use and experimental behaviours. Data were collected as part of the 1993 Swiss Multicentric Adolescent Survey on Health. In this survey, anonymous self-administered questionnaires were distributed to a national representative sample of 10 000 in-school adolescents (15–20 years of age). Univariate analyses explored the relationships between the level of sport activity and health variables; then logistic regression analyses examined the strength of these relationships. According to the results, half of the sample do sports more than twice a week, boys more often as part of a sports club. Differences between non-athletic and athletic adolescents describe the latter as having less somatic complaints, more confidence in their future health, a better body image, a lesser tendency to attempt suicide, a higher frequency of use of the car seat belt, and a lower use of tobacco, wine and marijuana. Links between the frequency of sport activity and the locus of control related to health, general satisfaction with life or sexual behaviours are less strong. It must be noticed that the cross-sectional data collection precludes the establishment of a causal relationship between exercise and health behaviours. However, the existing links underline the coexistence of positive health characteristics and sport activity, suggesting that an incitement to get involved in physical activity may be a necessary component of a comprehensive prevention approach among adolescents.

The Power of Sport

Sport and physical education play an important role at the individual, community, national and global levels. For the individual, sport enhances one’s personal abilities, general health and self-knowledge. On the national level sport and physical education contribute to economic and social growth, improve public health, and bring different communities together. On the global level, if used consistently, sport and physical education can have a long-lasting positive impact on development, public health, peace and the environment.

Access to and participation in sport and physical education provide an opportunity to experience social and moral inclusion for populations otherwise marginalized by social, cultural or religious barriers caused by gender, disability, or other forms of discrimination. Sport and physical education can represent an area to experience equality, freedom and a dignifying means for empowerment. The freedom and control over one’s body experienced in the practice of sport is particularly valuable for girls and women, for people with a disability, for people living in conflict areas, for people recovering from trauma.

Sport and Development

Sport is a catalyst for economic development. Individually, each of the various sectors of the sports economy can create activity, jobs and wealth. When several are combined together into a single strategy, it is possible to achieve additional economic gains because of the synergies that result. The local economic potential of sport is further enhanced when supported by national ‘sport for all’ strategies.

Securing Government leadership is essential to ensure that sport and physical education are incorporated into country development and international cooperation policies and agendas. Governmental commitment is also crucial to ensuring that the root causes of the issues that challenge human development are addressed, and sport is used as one of the tools for that.

The engagement of the UN specialized agencies, programmes and funds demonstrated the potential breadth and depth of sport to support the UN system in achieving development goals. The IYSPE 2005 will seek to engage Governments and the world of sport more deeply in sport-based development activities in order to ensure that this powerful and diverse element of civil society becomes an active and committed force in the global partnership for development.

Local development through sport particularly benefits from an integrated partnership approach to sport-for-development involving the full spectrum of actors in field-based community development including all levels and various sectors of government, sports organisations, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the private sector. Strategic sport-based partnerships can be created within a common framework providing a structured environment allowing for coordination, knowledge and expertise sharing and cost-effectiveness.

Sport and Health

In 2002 the World Health Organization (WHO) World Health Report indicated that mortality, morbidity and disability attributed to the major non-communicable diseases accounted for over 60% of all deaths, and unhealthy diets and physical inactivity were among the leading causes of these diseases.

Sport and physical activity are crucial for life-long healthy living. Sport and play improve health and well-being, extend life expectancy and reduce the likelihood of several non-communicable diseases including heart disease.

Regular physical activity and play are essential for physical, mental, psychological and social development. Good habits start early: The important role of physical education is demonstrated by the fact that children who exercise are more likely to stay physically active as adults. Sport also plays a major positive role in one’s emotional health, and allows to build valuable social connections, often offering opportunities for play and self-expression.

Recognizing the important links between sport, physical activity and health, in 2004 the WHO adopted the Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health and a Resolution Health Promotion and Healthy lifestyles. Both documents emphasize the importance to start the practice of adapted physical activity early in childhood.

In 2004, the United Nations Joint Program on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) was the latest United Nations system organisation to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to involve the world of sport more actively in fighting the epidemic.