How To Give Yourself A Massage
If you’re lucky, you’ve got a significant other willing to work your body over with a massage after a particularly tough day at the gym. If you’re not that lucky, or if you don’t even have a significant other, you probably have to give yourself some love. And a self massage.
If you work out, you definitely need to know how to give yourself a massage. Relaxing yourself goes a long way towards minimizing the fatigue that comes with a tough day at the gym or at work. For people at work, a quarter of an hour of a self massage can boost and improve alertness and job performance.
Rubbing your stomach or belly after a good and hearty meal can seem like playing the part of Buddha too well, but it definitely works as a self massage. Some people even do this on instinct. To do this, you start by putting one or both your palms on your stomach. Then you rub it in a clockwise direction, which is the direction food travels through your body, thus inducing and stimulating smoother digestion.
The morning is the best time to work out the kinks in your body. This is the best time to apply the knowledge of how to give yourself a massage.
Start by hammering the sides of your body every morning – with a fist, not with an actual hammer, cause that’s likely to cause more trouble that good. Start from top to bottom, on your arms and legs.
After doing that, you can move inwards, bottom to top, along your torso. This prepares your body for the day by rousing it from sleep. Your body just spent around 6-8 hours staying absolutely still, recovering from the previous day. It’s only natural to remember that you need to wake it up for the next one.
A good rub down after and of course, before exercise can be just as beneficial as a good stretch or doing the proper warmup before you jump on the treadmill or onto the Smith Machine. A good massage can clean out all the waste that builds up when you’re working hard.
As with the morning routine, you should pummel your leg and arm muscles before you work out to induce blood flow, which is immensely important. A good rub down after the fist pummeling is also important. Remember to use your fists, once again, not an actual hammer or mallet. That’ll make you a job at the emergency room.
We’ve all got things to deal with, stressful things that make us tense and nervous and generally unpleasant. A good massage goes a long way towards dealing with these stresses. Dealing with stress generally also lengthens a person’s life span – a good reason to learn how to give yourself a massage if there was any.
There are other ways to self massage, more technical ways in fact, but these should work well for someone who just wants to be a little more relaxed than they usually are. I know it worked for me.