Muscle guarding: as common of an experience as it is, you may have never even heard that term before. So what is it? Muscle guarding, according to Dr. Martin Schmaltz, is your body’s first response to pain in the pain cycle. Let’s say that you pull a muscle lifting something heavy. Whether you do it intentionally or not, your body responds to the injury by telling all of the muscles surrounding the area to tighten up and “guard” that injured location. This sounds good in theory, right? Your body is protecting itself so you can heal quickly and efficiently. Well, this can go downhill fast!
In this blog, we will further discuss muscle guarding and how massage can help alleviate your pain and protect your muscles in the long run.
The Science Behind Muscle Guarding
So why does your body intentionally cause itself so much pain? It isn’t with ill intention, it’s almost like a protection mechanism (at least at first). As explained above, when you injure yourself, the muscles surrounding that area will tighten up in efforts of splinting the injured area. However, this muscle tightness can lead to restricted mobility in joints even after your injury heals. This, in turn, just leads to more problems later on down the road.
It’s very likely that you’ve had this happen to you before. Let’s say you’re working out and lifting some heavy weights and you manage to injure the muscles around your neck and/or shoulder area. Your body’s initial response is to stiffen up from the pain. But then, for the rest of the day, you find yourself turning your entire body rather than just turning your head when you need to look at something. When you look down, you notice that you’re bending at the hips and leaning your entire body forward rather than just your head and neck.
You’ve got to keep moving those muscles to prevent further injury. But how?
How to Catch Muscle Guarding Before it Happens
Once you understand what muscle guarding is, you can take a few different approaches to stopping it in its tracks. If you suffer a serious injury, you need to take serious action towards your recovery journey. Physical therapy, chiropractic adjustments, massage, and more can help you fight back against muscle guarding and get back to normal quicker than you would on your own.
Chiropractic adjustments can trigger nerve fibers near and far from your injury. This in turn helps your body turn its focus away from the pain of the injury and towards relaxing those tense muscles that have been trying to protect you this entire time. Physical therapy along with the use of heat, ice, or even electrical stimulation can also be of benefit.
How Massage Can Help
If you want to break the muscle guarding cycle and combat the restricted mobility, muscle weakness, decreased function, and emotional and mental stress, massage is one of the best routes to take. Talking with a massage therapist can lead to you creating a self-care routine that not only helps with injuries, but also with so many other aspects of your life.
Come see Jeremy at Muscle Anthropology here in Evans, Georgia. He offers a variety of different types of massages so that you can meet your goals, no matter what they are. From trigger point massage to Swedish massage, deep tissue work, or even trauma release therapy, we aim to help you improve your relationship with your body in every way that we can.
You only get one body. Take care of it!