I’ve played rugby in the front row since the age of 12, and I’ve had my share of neck and back injuries – thankfully nothing very serious, but enough to keep me off the pitch for 6-12 months sometimes. In the past 3-4 years I’ve been seeing a chiropractor regularly, and I think he’s been good for me in a preventative manner (although he’s horrified that I still play rugby), but recently when I had an issue to resolve it didn’t work out so well and I reckoned I needed to look elsewhere.
A while back I built a website for Dene Hickey, a “qualified neuromuscular therapist”. I hadn’t a clue what ” neuromuscular therapy” meant at the time, but it sounded impressive. I recently met Dene about another website for his growing sports massage business.
When I not so subtly mentioned the acute back pain I was suffering Dene immediately offered me a free deep tissue massage where he would “de-activate” the trigger points. I’ve had sports massages before and I’ve noticed that the masseuse or masseur rarely goes hard enough on the troublesome muscles. No such trouble with Dene, he’s a strong guy who works on amateur and semi-pro rugby players regularly, but as well as just going in strong, he really found the pain points and sorted them out.
As he was working on the muscles, one of the interesting things for me was learning a bit about Trigger Points. I won’t try to explain it here – click through the link to Wikipedia or Dene’s trigger points therapy page.
I felt an order of magnitude times better after the session, the acute back pain was greatly diminished almost to non-existance. If you’re suffering from chronic muscular spasm or pain, from sports or even from office chairs, then I highly recommend you find a massage clinic specialising in deep tissue massage and trigger point therapy. If you’re in the Dublin area, I don’t think you could do much better than to give Dene a call.