But how does anxiety and depression fit into that pattern? Is it any different?

When we become depressed we might be lethargic, sad, anxious, worried and fearful of the future. We can find ourselves in a repeat loop – a seeming endless cycle of frustration and melancholy.

At the bottom of this pit of despair can lie basic assumptions that we are making about our past and our future. The present might seem like a painful place as we agonise about what has been, and what is to come.

Our muscular reactions are no different than in the flight, fight or freeze response – we are, in effect reacting to an internal stimulus that is telling us we have reason to be fearful. And like the sabre tooth tiger in the aforementioned post, it can hurt us – so we freeze, or panic in order to try to combat that fear.

This leads to deep muscle tension, muscle stiffness, chronic back pain, shoulder pain, frozen shoulders and back spasms.

But how can deep tissue massage help?

By using gentle breathing techniques, and giving our clients a sense of body awareness, we can help reduce anxiety and decrease tension. By focusing on the present moment we can facilitate the easing of tensions in both the mind and the body. All City Sports massage therapists can facilitate this inquiry. City Sports Massage principal therapist Jon Gee also uses counselling skills to work through what has led to the present situation of pain and dysfunction – and offers gentle guidance in how to challenge assumptions, and rise above the daily grind of incessant, negative thought patterns. The same thought patterns that keep us locked in a cycle of pain and dysfunction.

A journey of discovery should be an enriching process, and taken at a comfortable speed. But if we are brave enough to meet our pain, then awareness, breathing and bodywork can help us eradicate it.

© Jon Gee 2011

Jon Gee is the founder of City Sports Massage, a team of massage therapists in London who combine deep-tissue massage therapy with stress-reduction and body-awareness techniques.

City Sports Massage offer massage therapy in Islington, Mayfair, Holborn and London Bridge.

JM: Running has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, growing up I lived next to the beach and used to find myself running through the dunes for hours on end. At school I played rugby, and being out on the wing, and then later playing at fullback, I found I had to combine speed, agility and stamina to survive. Once out in the big, bad world, I needed a sport that I could pick up and take with me anywhere, and running perfectly fits that bill!


JG: What led you to enter such a challenging race?

JM: Good question, and one I ask myself before every run!

I subscribe to a podcast Marathon Talk, where they interviewed the famous South African runner Bruce Fordyce. I find Bruce really inspiring, he has won the 56 mile race 9 times, with 8 of them being consecutive wins! I was planning to run a race for the charity ARC, and my wife Lis and I thought that Comrades was a big enough challenge, and one that people would engage with and support.


JG: You have a full-time job – How have you managed to fit training and nutrition into your life?

JM: Taking the training first, running should be a part of your everyday routine and needs to be scheduled in where possible. Longer runs are on Saturday and Sunday, this involves early starts and a lot of bartering / chore trading with the missus! However, when you run along the canal on a sunny morning and watch the world wake up it is a wonderful feeling, even after 20 miles! On nutrition for longer runs over 13 miles your body will tell you when it needs fuel, and it is best to eat often and sparingly. I take a sports drink make up from powder `High 5’, `9bar’ snacks and bananas. Everyone is different so the best advice is to just to find what you like and stick with it.


JG: You’ve been a long-term client of City Sports Massage in London, and I know you’ve approached training methodically, carefully even. Do you think that has been part of your success so far?

JM: Definitely, long distance training needs to be carefully planned with routes, mileage and times all prepared and monitored. There are plenty of plans out there for half, marathon and ultra-distances; find one and stick to it. Don’t be tempted to exceed, or beat the plan, it’s far better to build gradually and progressively. For Comrades I have used a remote coach Ian Corless of www.runwildrunfree.co.uk.


JG: What would be your ‘Top five tips’ for would-be, long-distance runners?

JM:
1. Find, stick to and monitor progress against your plan.
2. Try and buddy up with someone to run with every so often, it helps improve pace and the time flies by.
3. Factor in time for rest and recuperation, its ok to have an off day.
4. Incorporate regular massage sessions into your training, a massage therapist can really help flush the muscles out, making them feel lighter and faster. It also heals and prevents injury and helps prepare you for the next challenge.
5. Celebrate the success of finishing, and live to fight another day!


JG: Thank you for your time Jon, we know our readers will be happy to be privy to your experience and advice. We look forward to catching up with you when you get back from South Africa, and you can tell us what it’s like to experience 56 miles of the Comrades ultra-marathon! Good luck from all of us at City Sports Massage!

Jon McGowan is running for the charity ARC. Find out more about his story here.

Discovering the space in one minute.

Find somewhere you wont be disturbed for 60 seconds or so. Close the door. Turn your devices to silent. Set a timer for 60 seconds. A vibrate alert on a phone is ideal.

Now get in a comfortable, seated position. You can do this anywhere. Even the toilet!

Close your eyes, and breath slowly in through your nostrils, and slowly out through your nostrils. Slowly.

Slower.

That’s one breath.

Continue in this slow, measured manner, really noticing the breath, and counting each one.

Continue until the alert on your timer goes off.

What did you discover?

At the end of the minute – how many breaths did you count?

What happened to time? Did it feel like a long time? Did it pass quickly? What did you notice?

Were you paying attention to the breath? Or was your mind naturally wondering?

Consider all these questions, and ask yourself how you are feeling – paying special attention to any differences in breathing rates. Note any sensations in your muscles.

Taking it further.

This is going to sound crazy, but in order to get the most out of the time you set aside for this activity, you will need to forget about trying to achieve a goal.

Simply observe your breathing. Try not to be judgmental. Be curious.

Explore.

Imagine you don’t know exactly where you’re going, and you’ve got plenty of time get there.

Why not set the timer, and try it again?

FAQs.

Q. I tried it, and I just kept thinking about what I was having for dinner, about a current project, or about my kids. What went wrong?

A. Nothing. That’s normal. Don’t get annoyed with your thoughts, that’s all they are – thoughts. The trick is to notice them, and just gently push them to one side. Thoughts, like sheep, aren’t always the brightest things, they go running about, bumping into each other and getting confused. So like sheep, gently herd them away, so you can get along with just counting the breath…one…two…

Q. Wow. That was cool! It went really slowly and felt like ages. I breathed slowly, and I feel calmer. What’s next?

A. Great! That’s the first stage of reclaiming your body. Every time we breath into to our lungs we stretch our ribs. This in turn creates movement that eases pain and promotes a healthy, functioning torso. Our shoulders are perched on top of our ribs, so guess what? Yep, it can even stretch our shoulders too. We have also began to develop our proprioception. But more about that soon – in the meantime; enjoy a minute out during your day.

Q. Is this meditation, or mindfulness as it’s often known?

A. Yes! It’s practices like this that are well established in more than 250 hospitals in the USA, teaching natural, pain and stress relief techniques.

Conclusion.

By giving yourself this space – just a minute – you can reconnect with the breath. One minute is not generally considered a long time, yet it can make all the difference to a stressed-out day. And this is the foundation of pain-free living.

Try it!

Pro Tips.

Watch your breath entering and leaving your body. If it helps, imagine you are breathing in white, positive, energising light, and breathing out black, negative smoke. Or make up your own colours – be creative, and enjoy focusing on just the breath.

Notice how it feels. Do your muscles feel soft, or hard? Try to release the muscles on the ‘out’ breath.

Enjoy any feelings of calm. You created them!

© Jon Gee 2011

To read more about the way we combine deep-tissue massage with mindfulness – Stay tuned!

Jon Gee is the founder of City Sports Massage, a team of massage therapists in London who combine deep-tissue massage therapy with stress-reduction and body-awareness techniques.

The role of the breath.

From the first breath we took as a baby, our bodies stay alive by using our breathing to provide oxygen to our brains, organs and muscles.

But the role of the breath goes much deeper than that. It directly affects the mobility of many of our muscles. It is inherently intertwined with our body’s emotional responses and stress levels.

When we understand the functionality of the breath, we can form a connection with our bodies and our emotions, and begin an excitingly empowering path to self-healing.

Fight, flight or freeze – an easy explanation.

The breath forms an intrinsic part of a chain of events that occur during the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response. In this article, it is the activity of the breath during the ‘freeze’ response that we are most interested, as is directly responsible for stress-related muscular pain.

Let’s just imagine you are sitting in your cave, eating your dinner, and minding your own business. A Sabre tooth tiger strolls past the mouth of the cave, and you have 3 choices;

1. Run up, and punch him on the nose (fight)
2. Try to run past him and escape (flight)
3. Or sit very, very still, and hope he doesn’t notice you (freeze)

Now there has been much talked about the fight, or flight responses – blood flowing to the limbs and heart racing, as you get ready to meet a potential grisly death. But what is less talked about is the freeze response. Which, ironically, is the most common one experienced in the modern day workplace.

The freeze response

Let’s imagine it’s late afternoon on a Friday. You’ve only got a couple of hours left to work, before you’re due to head out for pre-planned, romantic date. Without warning your boss comes along, dumps a huge file on your desk, and asks for it to be dealt with before you leave.

What do you do?

1. Stand up, and without a single word, proceed to punch them in the head? (fight)
2. Grab your coat, and run out the door? (flight)
3. Or sit very still, and try to suppress the stress you have just been placed under? (freeze)

If you are the sort of person who took one of the first two options, you’re probably reading this whilst watching Daytime TV, and weighing up your recently-narrowed career options.

Most of us however, would have plumped for the last option. We freeze, and hope that we will survive this incredibly stressful situation.

So what’s happening to our body’s when we ‘freeze’?

Our breathing becomes shallow.
Our ribs barely move.
Muscles become extremely tense.

We are ‘playing dead’ – remember the Sabre tooth tiger? If he doesn’t see us in his peripheral vision we might survive!

When this is repeated day after day in our workplace, our muscles become semi-permanently locked in the same pattern, leading to pain and dysfunction. Typical complaints are tight, sore, frozen shoulders, stiff necks, tight chest and sore backs. Sound familiar?

At the core of this frozen movement is one factor. Its the very thing that is suppressing a basic movement that will give us away as being ‘alive’.

Our breathing.

NEXT

Find pain relief with breathing. Part 2. Exploring the breath; and the how mindfulness and deep tissue massage can work together.

© Jon Gee 2011

Jon Gee is the founder of City Sports Massage, a team of massage therapists in London who combine deep-tissue massage therapy with stress-reduction and body-awareness techniques.

What sort of massage am I looking for?
In the UK there are two terms – deep tissue and sports massage. A sports massage qualification requires more hours of study and practice than a deep tissue qualification, and the BTEC diploma is currently the highest level of sports massage certification in the UK.

So you really dont need to have a ‘sports injury’? In fact the majority of our clients work in an office and many suffer from stress, tension, anxiety, and all the things that are normal in a modern-day, city-based lifestyle.

At City Sports Massage we have developed a way of working that includes ALL of the factors in your lifestyle. This is largely centred on our ability to encourage COMMUNICATION. There is no reason you can’t find that elsewhere, but you might need to look hard! This article is designed to help you in that search.

Where do I start?
Your first port of call should be your social network-friends, colleagues, loved ones. Have they had a successful treatment locally? If not, then try asking at ballet academies, football and rugby clubs.

There are various sports massage and complementary health associations, and although membership will guarantee a certain minimum level of good quality training, what you are really looking for in a therapist is not just training, but also equal measures of dexterity, communication, empathy, confidence and willingness to listen. Unfortunately there is no existing ‘directory’ that guarantees all these qualities.

Online searches
Search online – ‘sports massage (your area)’, ‘deep tissue massage (your area)’. In the UK you could look at Level 4 or 5 BTEC qualified massage therapists on www.thesma.org and try cross referencing their name to see if you can find any reviews or testimonials online. Check out running and cycling forums where people are often sharing recommendations.

So you’ve found a potential therapist?
So you’ve found a potential therapist. Do they have any customer testimonials or references? A successful therapist should have no end of willing clients pleased to put in a good word. But maybe they’ve just qualified? Don’t be put off by that, they might be naturally fantastic and as-yet-undiscovered. Many newly qualified therapists are happy to offer introductory discounts as they build up their confidence and client base. Why not book in for a short introductory session to see if it feels ‘right’? But do bear in mind that, depending on your temperament, it might take you a little time to relax into the session, so don’t expect any ‘miracles’ from a short session.

Communication is the key
A successful treatment is dependent on your relationship with your therapist. You should try to be direct and straightforward with your requests. A good therapist will be sensitive, but none are ‘mind readers’ – so be prepared to clearly communicate your desired outcome.

Try to go into the session with an open, relaxed state of mind. Remember that the vast majority of working therapists are kind, caring sensitive people who genuinely want to help you. The more relaxed you are the more a therapist can ‘work their magic’ – because your tissues are softer and more pliable.

So to summarise;

Do your research – ask friends, colleagues, family, local sports clubs or dance companies.

Search online – ‘sports massage (your area)’, ‘deep tissue massage (your area)’.

Ask for testimonials/references if you find someone you think might be suitable.

Communicate your wishes – both before the treatment and during. Remember a treatment is a relationship, and trust and communication is the lifeblood of any relationship.

© Jon Gee 2011

Jon Gee is the founder of City Sports Massage, a team of massage therapists in London who combine deep-tissue massage therapy with stress-reduction and body-awareness techniques.

How can massage help?
By facilitating release of the chest using breathing and gentle yet powerful movements, shoulders can be worked on, tight tissues made to melt away, and very easy-to-follow exercises given to strengthen posture.

2. It’s difficult to move my neck.
Can’t turn your head around? Feel like you’ve ‘wrenched’ your neck? Often a gradual tightening of the muscles precedes a muscle tear; which in turn leads to a ‘spasm’ – where the muscles ‘lock’, and seem reluctant to let go.

How can massage help?
By focusing on releasing the muscles slowly the spasm can be eased, and muscles restored to a healthier range of motion. With a competent therapist, you should feel it happening quite quickly!

3. After I run/exercise I get a pain in my muscles.
Hamstrings feel tight or restrictive? Glutes (buttocks) painful? A knee feels like it’s being pulled off-centre? Often when we train hard the body responds the only way it knows – by yelping in pain! Good, hard training inevitably leads to an accumulation of natural toxic waste – the by-products of muscle activity. Whilst warm-downs, hot showers and stretching after activity can help shift these troublesome particles, sometimes the build up becomes too much, and intervention is needed.

How can massage help?
Massage ‘flushes’ out the muscles, and overworked, torn and knotted muscles can be ‘persuaded’ to go back to their original, healthy, functioning pain – free state!

4. I feel very stiff in the mornings, but it gets better throughout the day.
This is possibly because your body has been moving very little for several hours. Our bodies are made for MOVEMENT, and will ‘grumble’ at us if we hold them in static positions for too long.

How can massage help?
When investigating the source of the discomfort, we often find it is within tissues that are already tight from our daily routines. The long periods of static sleep are usually ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. A good massage therapist can help review your daily routines, and look at the possible causes. This is in addition to manual deep-tissue, or sports massage, which will unlock tight tissues, and should provide a rapid and measurable amount of pain relief.

5. I can’t sleep at night, and it’s getting worse.
Thoughts rushing through your head? About today? About tomorrow? Chances are you’re breathing is shallow, and you’re exhibiting all the signs of the ‘fight or flight’ stress response.

How can massage help?
Breathing is the key in this scenario, along with exercises in mindfulness. A well trained, advanced massage therapist should be able to help you in this regard. It’s quite a specialist subject, so make sure you ask your therapist if they have experience in this area (all of the City Sports Massage team do). The idea is, by teaching our muscles when they are ‘on’ and when they are ‘off’, even the most stressed-out of us can learn to take back control of our sleep patterns. This is ironically achieved by initially relinquishing control of our muscles, and allowing ourselves to gain a knowledge of what soft, relaxed, loose muscles actually feel like.

COMING NEXT…

“I’d love to come and visit City Sports Massage, but I don’t live in London – so how do I choose the right massage therapist in my locality?”

**Please note that you should consult your GP if you are in any doubt of your health condition**

Article © Jon Gee 2011

Jon Gee is the founder of City Sports Massage, a team of massage therapists in London who combine deep-tissue massage therapy with stress-reduction and body-awareness techniques.

You’re suffering from aching, painful shoulders, neck stiffness, and you might even be getting headaches too. It gets worse when you sleep, but mysteriously better when you have a drink or two? Sound familiar?

This is one of the most common, aggravating – yet easy-to-treat set of conditions found in the modern day work environment.

Surprisingly enough we weren’t designed to sit in the same position for 8 hours a day. But before you go and tell your boss what you think of him/her, and jump on a jet plane for a ‘long break’, there’s some incredibly basic and easy-to-follow principles you can learn, which could drastically improve your lot!

At the bottom of this quandry is usually one word – MOVEMENT. The simple reason most of us suffer these aches and pains is LACK OF MOVEMENT. In short, your body is designed for movement. When it doesn’t move for long periods of time it becomes unhappy, starts complaining, and that’s when you feel ‘pain’.

But what’s happening?

Our muscles are coated in a strong, thin film of connective tissue called ‘fascia’. If you’ve ever prepared chicken, you might remember taking the skin off the bird and seeing the membrane covering all the muscles? That’s fascia. As well as covering the whole muscle, it covers all the individual muscle fibres too. In fact, our ‘muscle’ is nothing more than a type of protein paste, with fascia forming surrounding the paste, much like a sausage, to form individual, microscopic muscle fibres. These in turn are coated with more fascia – which binds all the ‘sausages’ together to form what you see as a big ‘muscle’.

Following so far? Now as you can imagine, every time our muscles move, the fascia gets worn down. In order to maintain our structure, it needs to grow – constantly. Which is all well and good in a healthy, moving body – it grows, it gets worn down etc, etc. But in a body that isn’t moving. Well, that’s where the drama really starts.

Ouch!

You’re sitting at your desk, slumped over the computer in the same position you’ve been in all day. The muscles aren’t moving, yet the fascia continues to grow. As we now know, the fascia isn’t being ‘worn down’ by the movement, so, continuing to grow, it starts further restricting movement in already stiff areas. It’s not getting lubricated so it becomes dry and forms a hard, compact substance. Furthermore, muscle waste such as lactic acid gets trapped too. You now have a big, nasty traffic jam going on. And we all know how painful they can be!

So clever clogs, what’s the answer?

Well if you remember, the cause of the pain was LACK OF MOVEMENT. So it stands to reason that the solution here is MOVEMENT. You need to move those muscles, regularly. Get up, go and get a drink of water. Slowly shrug your shoulders – both forwards, and backwards. Slowly rotate your neck by looking to the left, then the right. Then slowly look up, and slowly look down. Everything should be done slowly, taking care to really feel what you are doing. Try shutting your eyes when you do it – this will heighten your senses surrounding your body awareness.

And once you’ve gone through these basic movements, get creative. You don’t have to launch into a contemporary dance routine in the middle of the office, but you can explore where your restrictions are, and see how they feel when you slowly stretch them.

It might all feel a little clunky at first. You’ll probably wonder if you’re doing it right. But keep trying, it’s a learning process.

Remember that getting to know your body is a journey, so don’t expect it to all come at once.

Is that it?

Well yes and no. Sometimes it’s as simple as learning how to move the body – and the techniques described above will suffice. But sometimes your body will be so ‘set’ in a cycle of dysfunction that it will have created further imbalances and weaknesses. These can be treated by a good sports and remedial therapist who can recommend easy stretches and relaxing exercises that will help you to restore function. Occasionally you may need to be referred to another specialist, which a good sports and remedial massage therapist will be able to recommend.

And remember – if you’re suffering from regular headaches you should always go and get checked out by your doctor!

Do your friends and loved ones a favour – Please forward this on to anyone you think who might be helped by the info within!

So quite simply holding a mouse, or clicking away on a laptop can cause pain in the arm, tingling in the fingers, and tightness in the forearms too. All of which can be helped by massage. We sometimes advise clients to try using the mouse with the other hand (which trains the brain too!)

And then there’s the weightlifters, bodybuilders, and gym bunnies who grip too hard on the bars they’re lifting and pulling, causing the forearm to take the strain instead of the muscles they should be working.

So find a good, reputable sports massage therapist, and get a decent, focused massage. You’ll find few simple changes of habits can help keep you out of pain. If you’re in London, check out our clinic locations, where our therapists can help and advise you on these issues – not just in providing immediate pain relief, but looking at long term solutions of how to stay pain free.

It seems crazy to NOT do it after all that training – not seeing your partner, missing out on post-work drinks, trying to explain your diet to others…

At City Sports Massage we love obsession. It’s in our blood – and that’s why we provide such a warm welcome to long distance runners who come through our door. Whether they’re running the New York marathon, Chicago marathon or the Dublin marathon, the Great North run or the Great South run. We treat them all.

We specialise in providing support to those in training. We keep hip flexors flexible, shin splints soothed, Achilles tendonitis tamed, and we knock out knee pain. And also, not least, we give moral support, encouragement and advice.

Because our clinics are in Central London we get runners from all over the world coming through our doors. Often coming straight from Heathrow Airport to get a massage!

Anyhow it would be rude to blow our own trumpet too much – maybe it’s better to let others do it!?

In this situation massage will certainly help. But to get even MORE out of your massage, check out these easy ways to ease neck, shoulder and arm pain.

1. Move
Neck pain and shoulder stiffness are often caused by a very simple reason – lack of movement. So move! Slowly shrug and rotate your shoulders, turn your head left and right, look up and down. Do it all sloooowly. Feel it!

2. Drink water
Our bodies get dehydrated working all day long. This makes the muscles stiffer than normal – our bodies need water to lubricate movement – so drink.

3. Have regular breaks
Combine a ‘movement break’ (see number 1) with a ‘water break’ (see number 2) in your daily routine. Every 20 – 40 minutes. Eventually it will become second nature. When it does become second nature even the male of our species is able to multi-task, often stretching the shoulders AND looking at the computer screen at the same time. C’mon fellas – lets show those girls our multi-tasking ninja moves.

4. Have a hot bath
Heat from the water will bring fresh blood to the stiff areas. It will lengthen and loosen tight muscles and allow more movement. But don’t fall asleep, wake up in a cold bath and be back at square one ;-)

5. Stretch
Think of pussycats. Do they need stretching manuals? Do they ‘time’ their stretches? No. They ‘feel’ what’s going on in their bodies. If it feels nice – they carry on. If it hurts, they stop. Feel it. Learn about your body. Don’t be intimidated by it. It’s yours!

6. Get a massage
Even if you’ve done all of the above, and you’ve persuaded your other half to give you a shoulder rub, the chances are (especially if you’ve left it too long) you’ll need a professional to get into those difficult spots. Go to a sports and remedial massage therapist. Make sure they’re reputable and qualified. If you live in the UK make sure they have a BTEC qualification and are a member of a contactable professional organisation. If the therapist has a website check out their testimonials before you book.

A good therapist will be able to show you all of the techniques described above, and more (although we reckon you can probably manage the bath on your own. And the glass of water for that matter).

Please note: If you think you may have an injury or anything more serious than work posture-related stiffness and pain, please consult a medical practitioner immediately.