New year, new beginnings

The end of the year offers great opportunity to look back: The races past, the training gone through, the results gotten and hopefully the injuries avoided. New year, new beginnings: Looking ahead and looking at races, looking at training schedules and looking at races coming up in the year. And hopefully injuries to be avoided.
The great thing about facturing a massage into your weekly routine is that it improves your recovery, improves the way you can train and hopefully avoid injuries. Wait – make that definitively avoid injury. Like many of my customers would confirm to you the difference between feeling half recovered and feeling great is having had a massage in between sessions. Less inflammation, improved circulation and better range of motion are just some of the benefits regular massage can deliver to you.
As we are counting down the weeks to Ironman New Zealand in Taupo (yes, it is that time of the year again) we are also getting to some of the most strenuous training sessions any endurance athletes experiences. The peak training session, when we are training in the rare top 10 % of performance, the extra miles area really adding up. Accumulated fatigue becomes a crucial factor in building strength. It is ever more important to recover well. I recommend to my athletes to schedule your recovery massage 24 to 48 hours after your hardest session, so that the effects of delayed onset muscle soreness have started to subside, so that massage can be more effective. Quite simply put in this context it is not about ‘no pain, no gain’, but is actually the other way around ‘ more gain with no pain’.

And just a little word of advice: Early bird catches the worm – please make sure you book your appointments early. As we are getting closer to the first week of March, you will struggle to book unless you got in well ahead !

Happy massaging ,
your team at Auckland Therapeutic Massage