Sports Massage Zone - Peta McSharry
Our Moorgate Sports Massage therapists treated some interesting cases in November. Our fascial treatments form a large part of our sports massage service, Peta’s training and 15 years experience give her a good knowledge of your body’s biomechanics, this allows her to get to the root cause of issues. We also have Tammy in clinic, she has a level 5 diploma in Soft Tissue Therapy (the same qualification as Peta). You'll be hearing more about Soft Tissue Therapy. as the Sports Massage market became diluted with qualifications not requiring a regulated diploma, it is hard for clients to understand whether someone advertising sports massage has a weekend course or has a full year plus study towards a diploma. The Associations offering the highest level of qualification (The ISRM and SMA) took the decision to rebrand their Sports Massage courses to reflect the depth of knowledge their courses offer - they choose Soft Tissue Therapy as a new way of raising the sports massage level offered. In essence this is sports massage, however it is underpinned with a solid knowledge base in Anatomy and Physiology, along with remedial training, essentially this looks at dysfunction and offers ways to restore your muscular system back to a standard operating mode.
Our sports massage clinic experiences seasonal changes throughout the year, marathon season tends to be March / April and October / November. New York marathon is the big draw card in the autumn but many others are popping up and with more clients running half marathons, it's a busy time for runners. We've seen an increase in clients coming from Bank for sports massage, due to changes in services in their area. It's a short walk from Bank station to our clinic, so we welcome the new opportunities. I'll start introducing some of the work I do with myofascial release or myofascial therapy, if you've read the reviews about Peta on Google, you'll know she has a reputation for fixing problems, this comes from her 15 years experience as a myofascial therapist.
Back from the Silk Road Mountain Race, mentally refreshed though still feeling the effects of the 800km of hard racing kilometres in my legs, it was great to see so many of my regular clients back in clinic. The increase in endurance sport brings us many clients needing ongoing help in recovery. The toll taken when doing longer training sessions of requires some myofascial or sports massage intervention and over this season a number of endurance swimmers sought our help. As an endurance athlete myself, I understand the mental effort required to finish these events resulting in my hands-on session including some mental preparation too.
Our Moorgate sports massage clinic is always busy with interesting injuries to fix, we get many referrals from our existing clients for both sports and non-sports muscular problems. But that’s not all we do, Peta is a myofascial therapist and it is this training that allows her to fix injuries rather than treat symptoms and the reason you may have read her Google Reviews. Many of us live with ongoing issues thinking this is just how we are built, or inherited it from our parents. Changing these problems is a team effort and we see many clients who are keen to put in some work to fix their ailments. Many instances clients are doing the remedial exercises and foam rolling regularly but the problem remains. It is in these cases Peta often finds a gap in the remedial program preventing the recovery from injury. August saw Peta out of clinic for much of the time as she headed to Kyrgyzstan to do the Silk Road Mountain Race, a beast of an off-road race over 1,700km. Instead of a monthly clinic summary, Peta will talk about instances where clients were doing remedial exercises and foam rolling but not seeing any results. This month she’ll talk about a common runners and cyclists complaint:
