How Massage can Benefit You at Each Stage of Injury Recovery

Using massage to give you that edge in your recovery process

Stages of Tissue Healing

The body is very good at healing itself. Say you fall and scrape your knee; within a week you’ve forgotten all about it and you’ve got a nice scar to show for it. Then 6 months later, it’s like it never even happened.

With more serious injuries, the process takes a bit longer but essentially follows the same principles. The tissues and your immune system work to naturally heal injury. But often they could use a bit of help, especially if whatever has happened is impacting your daily life! That’s where other therapies come in, including massage therapy – to speed up recovery, and make sure that when your body has finished healing, you can move and live exactly like you did prior to your injury.

There are three broad stages to the injury healing process; the acute, the sub-acute and the chronic phases. All of these stages are normal in the body’s journey to recovery, but may not apply to all types of injuries. Some of the injuries that will progress through these phases include:

• Strains

• Sprains

• Dislocation

• Fractures

• Bursitis

What is the Acute Phase of Healing?

In the acute stages of healing (the first 4-6 days after an injury), there’s an inflammatory reaction in the injured area. This is the very beginning of repair. There’s a large immune response and vascular changes (ie. swelling). What you will experience is pain and reduced movement in the area including spasms and increased tension in the tissues. This is your body’s way of immobilizing an area to allow it to heal.

The 5 Signs of Inflammation

The other aspect that you will experience is swelling and redness in the area. These are the signs of inflammation and healing. Swelling is an important factor in the healing process but can also elicit pain through pressure on the pain nerve fibers and limit your range of motion.

What Massage will do:

The most important goal for a massage therapist at this stage is to maintain the movement that you still have and prevent any further structures from becoming damaged. Other goals at this stage would be to manage the swelling and decrease any pain you may be experiencing. Aggressive manual techniques at this stage could be detrimental to the healing process. In a treatment session, a massage therapist would be using lighter techniques around the injury site and deeper techniques on muscles that have been compensating as a result of the injury. Touching the actual injury site at this stage could just re-open the injury and lengthen the healing process.

What is the Sub-Acute Phase of Healing?

The sub-acute phase of healing lasts about 10-17 days, but may last up to 6 weeks in tissues that don’t have a large blood supply like ligaments. This means that this phase typically ends 14-21 days after the injury happened. You’ll notice that the signs of inflammation (swelling, redness, heat, pain at rest) will slowly decrease and eventually disappear over the course of this phase. At this point in time the tissue is fragile and easily damaged.

What Massage will do:

Massage therapy can be very effective at this stage of healing. It can be used to reduce pain, promote good scar formation, increase tissue range of motion and decrease residual muscle tension. During this stage, treatment progressively challenges the tissues. This will reduce the chance of adhesions from new scar tissue development and slowly get the tissue used to more movement and stress.

Be aware that too much treatment at this stage could be detrimental to the healing process as you might see muscle spasms, weakness or a return of pain at rest.

What is the Chronic Phase of Healing?

This is the final stage of the healing process; there are no more signs of inflammation and scar tissue will become thicker and stronger. This phase may last 6 months to one year depending on the tissue involved and the amount of damage. There may be muscle weakness and contractures that limit range of motion in the area. There will be weakness. There will be limits to what your body can do. But this is when you’ll be doing more fine-tuning in your rehabilitation. At this point you’ll be feeling like your body is almost back to normal.

What Massage will do:

At this stage of healing, massage therapy treatments will be very similar to a normal treatment. The overarching goals are to normalize your range of motion and muscle strength to get you back to pre-injury function. Through exercises given as self-care and manual therapy, regular massage treatments will encourage speedy recovery.

All of the above is a general guideline for injury recovery. Healing time will change depending on the extent of the damage and the type of tissue, as well as change based on the person: Are they doing rehabilitation diligently? Are they motivated to get better? Are they taking care of their bodies? Are there other health conditions that may impact healing?

Massage therapy is an amazing tool that can really go a long way in getting a person back to their normal life. Utilizing it effectively during injury recovery can speed up the process and reduce the long term effects the injury may have (i.e. scars or joint mobility).