Tag Archives: Shoulder Pain

Trigger Point Body Work – How To Identify Them

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Trigger Point Body Work - How To Identify Them

Trigger Point Body Work – How To Identify Them

Trigger points are a common cause of pain and most people will have pain points and many people will have trigger points that are so severe that they are debilitating and ruin the quality of life for the person.  A trigger point is attached to a sensory nerve along to the spinal cord and straight back to the muscle cells.  They create complex patterns such as walking, sitting and millions of other motions and activities.  

Trigger Point Body Work – How To Identify Them

When this arc starts to malfunction the trigger points start to spasm which causes pain and discomfort. The muscle spindle starts to fire unnecessarily.   It is often a small area of spasm.  Inside the muscle is a trigger point complex which pulls a taut band in the muscle which feels like a guitar string in the muscle. You can see striations in the muscle.

When you see trigger points there is a contraction in and you can’t see the striations in the muscle which is a contraction  or a knot.  This contraction knot is a trigger point complex.  The trigger point sets off a pain pattern which is specific to each trigger point.

One example of this is the muscle that goes from the top of the muscle which goes to the top of the neck.  Pinch this area hard enough until you feel pain.  The pain usually goes upwards.  This is often the pain pattern you see.  The pain is often dull, achy.

Another common trigger point is in your gluteal muscle which can radiate down the leg.  Trigger points can cause pain in your face, gluts, chest, back or all over your body.  Trigger points are the basis of chronic muscle pain and they occur very commonly.   They are cause by a muscle reflex misfiring and they can be treated successfully.

Trigger Point Body Work Technique – How Do You Find Them

A trigger point is an area of low neurological activity when stimulated becomes an area of high neurological activity with or without a pain referral pattern.   You can find trigger points with the tips of the fingers.  If you close your eyes and and thumb and run the finger over the tips of your thumb you can become very sensitive to different sensations in the body.  If you touch very gently then it is not likely to be a trigger point.  If you lift the skin up and if you squeeze there and it hurts it can be something in the skin or the tissue but it’s not a trigger point.

You then want to feel the fascia which is a covering underneath the skin but over the muscles.  If there is not tenderness there then it’s not a trigger point.  The muscles fibers are underneath this layer.  You are feeling for a tight band within the muscle.  When you feel that band, you can become aware that there might be tender point or a thickening in the band and you might feel tenderness there.  Then you can start to focus in on this area like a radar.  As you press in firmly, you might feel something vague that is tender and there might be swelling.  All of those factors make it a trigger point.

Trigger Point Body Work – How Does Massage Therapy Help

You want start to work the trigger point therapy at area of insertion of the muscles.  It may or may not have a referral pattern.  When you find the spot as you start to palpate you might feel some intensity.  As you press down on this area, it might start to get more intense.  As you press down on it you should feel like the pain is getting less or it should feel like the pain is lessening.  If that is not happening then you should decrease the pressure on the points of the body.

Trigger Point Body Work – For Chronic Pain Relief

Trigger Point Therapy can be used for all kinds of chronic pain such as shoulder pain, headaches, neck pain as well as back pain.  You want to start to find the trigger points on the top of the head and press for about 10 seconds and check for intensity to lessen.  You want to check for tenderness and sensitivity.

Shoulder Girdle Pain – What Causes It?

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Shoulder Girdle Pain

Shoulder Girdle Pain and How To Treat It

Shoulder pain is a very common complaint responsible for millions of doctor visits, acupuncture visits and massage therapy visits each year.

Shoulder Girdle Pain – What Causes It

After back pain and headaches, it’s one of the most prevalent musculoskeletal pain complaints for patients. Pain in the shoulder can come from hundreds of causes.  Often the cause of the pain is a mystery to the patient since it has often been affected for years and sometimes as long as a decade. Nerves are responsible for messaging and signaling pain, and the shoulder area and the surrounding anatomy is covered by a dense network of nerves and muscle fibers.

Many of the nerves in the shoulder area are on their way to other sites in the body.  Often pain or injury in body part is felt in another area such as when a nerve in the back of the head can cause neck pain or a headache in the front of the forehead.  This is called referred pain.

Shoulder Girdle Pain – How To Treat It

Successful treatment of shoulder pain really depends on accurate diagnosis from your doctor or healthcare provider and correctly identifying the cause of the pain. An accurate diagnosis is the most integral part in correcting and eliminating shoulder pain.

Discomfort in this anterior chest area can possibly have referred pain from the cardiovascular areas such as the heart or the respiratory area such as the lungs, or digestive system such as the GI tract.   Cervical spine (neck) issues can refer pain and discomfort to the upper chest region also.

Shoulder pain does not often refer to the upper chest wall itself.  There are a significant number of nerves around the pectoralis major tendon that are coming out of the neck area that go behind the  clavicle, also called the collar bone on their way down the forearm along the chest wall.

So it’s easy to imagine that pain in this region can result from referred pain from this rich network of nerves traveling behind the coracoid and pectoralis minor.

Shoulder Girdle Pain – The Connection To The Rotator Cuff

We can see a significant number of nerves passing by the area of the biceps on their way down the arm. Cervically mediated pain can be referred here, pain from other chest wall abnormalities, and certainly shoulder pathology itself can also be referred as anterior shoulder pain.

The other part that can result in interior shoulder pain is a problem with the subscapularis which is the hidden part of the rotator cuff because it’s so often missed.

Occult shoulder instability can also present primarily as anterior shoulder pain. As we move on to the posterior aspect of the rotator cuff here we see the infraspinatus and the teres minor, and typically, pathology here will result in posterior shoulder pain.

 Shoulder Girdle – Causes Of Pain

Posterior shoulder pain has many different causes, tightness, muscular strain, referred pain again from the cervical spine, also referred pain in this region can come from a pinched nerve in the shoulder such as the supra-scapular nerve.

There are a large number of deeper, supportive muscles connecting the shoulder girdle to the remainder of the skeleton and a strain or sprain in any of these can result in pain in the upper back in addition to the posterior shoulder and back pain.

So it’s important to see that the shoulder girdle fits within the overall skeletal system and you can imagine if there’s abnormal curvature of the thoracic spine that might make the shoulder blade tilt forward further creating impingement and shoulder pain.