What will a Trigger Point session feel like, you may be asking yourself. Let me begin by letting you know that most of you have been receiving Trigger Point work all along.
Every time you come to me for a session, I ask what’s going on with your body. If you have any pain or discomfort at all, I do Trigger Point work. After my last two workshops and purchasing my fancy Trigger Point charts, I now may ask you to show me your pain pattern based on what you see on the chart whereas before, I had to cover more territory to find “the” spot. That chart shows me exactly what muscle(s) to work on. For this type of work, I check in with you for feedback a little more often to help guide me and the amount of pressure to use, but it basically feels like any other massage. If feels a lot like deep tissue massage, which many of you are familiar with.
For example, if you have head pain, I would ask where you feel it. If your pain pattern is similar to the red areas in this photo, I would work on the muscle indicated where the black X is located. Your pain could be any or all of the heavily or dotted red spots that you see. These spots are data points. Many, many, many research subjects were used to collect this data. Every time someone reported pain, it received a dot in that area. Therefore, the areas that are more heavily shaded had more subjects reporting pain in this area. The areas with fewer red dots had fewer subjects reporting pain in this area. But, as you can see, and what I say all the time, the problem area is NOT where the pain is! The muscle causing the pain in any of these areas is marked with an X, which tells me the muscle to work on. In this example, the muscle is located at the bottom of the neck/top of the shoulder. That is the muscle causing the pain in the neck, head and jaw.
I use Trigger Point Therapy as part of a regular massage session and find it most effective when working not only the problem area but the whole body as well since it is all connected!
