Massage therapy has an impressive range of physical, mental and emotional benefits. Some of these include:

• Major Stress Reduction: This helps such things as high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, headaches, heart disease, ulcers, irritable bowel, physical and emotional exhaustion. It also helps with insomnia and enhancing relaxation.

• Loosening Tight Muscles and Fascia: Tight muscles and fascia result from stress, injury, overuse and poor circulation. The bottom line of massage is decrease of chronic and acute soft tissue pain.

• Increased Circulation: This benefit results in better tissue healing, detoxification of metabolic waste products in the muscles that causes pain and soreness and better oxygenation to the cells.

• Relief From Chronic Pain: Massage, especially neuromuscular therapy, breaks up pathological pain patterns of the nervous system, stimulates endorphins, the body’s natural pain killer, helps correct postural and structural problems that lead to muscle pain and strain.

• Quicker Recovery Post Trauma: Immediate and regular massage after accidents (ie. motor vehicle, any kind of soft tissue injury) vastly shortens recovery time. This is especially true with Neuromuscular therapy.

• Helps Immune Function: This is accomplished by stimulating lymphatic flow (lymph contains specialized cells which fight infection) and inducing the relaxation response which favorably affects immunity.

• Promotes Well Being: This occurs by enhancing mind-body connection, sense of being nurtured and cared for, increasing mental relaxation and concentration and helping you feel generally at peace.

Types of Massage at Just For Health
(These are generally integrated into one treatment.)

Swedish: Basic manipulation of the superficial tissues of the human body with the hand, foot, arm or elbow using strokes such as effleurage, petrissage, tapotement, friction, vibration and joint range of motion. This is a relaxing technique that moves fluids towards the heart.

Deep Tissue: A deep type of massage used to relieve muscular tension, injury, strain and structural distortion. The idea of deep tissue is to separate muscles, layer by layer, work out the strain and adhesions, reduce congestion and lengthen shortened and thickened muscle fibers and fascia. The muscles are then reorganized along optimum patterns in the field of gravity.

Deep Tissue may be intense work which results in major therapeutic changes in the body.

Neuromuscular Therapy (NMT): “The pain reliever” This is a very successful therapy for managing and relieving pain in the soft tissue (muscles, ligaments, tendons and fascia.) NMT helps pain from whiplash or just about any injury, including back, neck, arm, knee pain, numbness and tingling down the arms or legs or limited joint mobility, migraines, sciatica and more.

NMT normalizes function between the nervous system and the muscular system, resulting in dramatic relief of chronic or acute pain. It works by removing TRIGGER POINTS—places where the soft tissue has undergone damage, causing high neurological transmission that translates as PAIN and referrals to other parts of the body.

Typically trigger points, once established in the body, produce trouble throughout life, getting worse, not better over time and being activated by a wide range of stress factors. NMT eliminates the pathological patterns by locating and working these trigger points.

Myofascial Release: This technique loosens the fascia, sheets of connective tissue that enclose muscles and soft tissue and holds the body’s organs in place. If fascia gets shortened or pulled from accidents, faulty posture or inherent defects, the underlying parts suffer—resulting in chronic pain and structural problems.

This work can give dramatic relief by helping the body return to normal alignment. Other names for this kind of work are Rolfing ™, Structural Integration and Human Engineering.

Reflexology: A type of bodywork that maps out reflexes to the whole body on the feet and hands. By pressing specific areas on the feet/hands each organ, gland and body part is affected. Reflexology also opens up meridians or energy pathways of the body and balances out the system.