What is Myofascial Release and How Can it Help Me?

Day-to-day life can present unexpected challenges. The stresses and strains of everyday life can take a toll on your body and leave you feeling tense, tired, and in pain. If you find your quality of life being negatively impacted by these symptoms, you may be able to benefit from myofascial release therapy.

In this blog, the care team at RehabOne Medical Group in Los Gatos, San Jose, Gilroy, and Salinas, California, explain what myofascial release therapy is and what it can treat.

What is myofascial therapy?

In myofascial therapy, we focus on releasing muscular tightness around your body. When you’re under tension, your muscles can actually shorten due to tensing and knotting up. We can therapeutically release shortness and tightness in your muscles and other tissues to give you relief.

During myofascial therapy, your provider manually massages and stretches areas of your body to release tension. Myofascial therapy can also help kickstart your body’s natural ability to heal itself. With myofascial therapy, we can work on the following:

Deep muscle tissue

By addressing damage in your muscles and connective tissue, this can reduce your healing time and potential complications after an injury or other trauma.

Trigger points

Trigger points are tight areas of muscle that develop due to overuse or injury. Our team can release these areas and thereby relieve tightness and pressure.

Fascia tissue

Fascia tissue is the dense tissue that covers your muscles and bones. Stretching this tissue can help decrease pain and increase mobility.

What can myofascial therapy do?

You might need myofascial therapy if you’ve experienced an injury or trauma that damaged your musculoskeletal system. You may also benefit from myofascial therapy if you have a temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder, migraine headaches, or a chronic pain condition, such as fibromyalgia or arthritis. Furthermore, conditions like insomnia, depression, and anxiety can also respond favorably to myofascial release therapy.

Patients with bleeding or blood vessel disorder, burns, or slow-healing wounds might not be good candidates for this type of treatment, and we don’t recommend this therapy for patients with bone fractures or severe osteoporosis.

Most people are good candidates for myofascial release therapy. One 60 minute appointment could have you feeling much better with lasting results. You could have some soreness the following day, but for most patients, the treatment sessions are very relaxing.

Holistic support

The team at RehabOne Medical Group recognizes that pain problems can be complex and require a combination of treatments to resolve. Myofascial release could form one of the building blocks of your treatment plan, along with physical therapy, medication management, and other holistic therapies.

To learn more about how myofascial release therapy could help support your health, book an appointment over the phone with RehabOne Medical Group today.