~ BOOK REVIEW ~
The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook
(Third Edition) : Your Self-treatment Guide
for Pain Relief
by Dr. Clair Davies, NCTMB
and Amber Davies, CMTPT, LMT
By Ma*Shuqa Mira Murjan
Self-Care with Trigger Point Therapy:
How to treat chronic pain yourself
For dancers, taking care of your body includes finding
methods to reduce injury and pain. Many of you know
that my first career was in health education, thus I believe
in doing the research, and reality testing therapeutic
approaches, while focusing on developing the best dietary
and lifestyle aspects that can keep you healthy and enhance
your life. While we can do everything possible to have a
healthy body, sometimes we still get sore muscles, or live
with pain from accidents, or have pain that occurs from
over-use of our body. I’m always looking for sources of pain
relief because I believe we shouldn’t just accept living with
pain if there may be options to relieve pain. And, thus I
found a great resource to share that can give us in-expensive,
easy-to-use, effective treatment that uses a self-treatment
approach utilizing trigger point massage that can be used
anytime, anywhere, and whenever we want to dispel our
pain – without pills, or treatment appointments.
What are “trigger points”? Trigger points are hyper-iritable
spots in skeletal muscles associated with hypersensitive
nodules in a taut band of muscle. Palpating your muscles
feeling a trigger point is like “feeling a little piece of partially
cooked spaghetti” deep in a muscle. Trigger points may
actually be a regional area and cluster of “knot-like” muscles.
Trigger points exist in specific places, where the motor nerve
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January 2020
comes into the muscle to tell the muscle to do it’s job. If
the band of muscle is taut it can be mistaken for a tendon.
And taut muscles that are tight restrict range of motion by
limiting a muscle’s ability to lengthen.