For those who place a high premium on health, massage and fitness can go hand in hand to boost overall well-being. By using both massage and fitness to promote your own health as well as the health of others, you may be able to reach higher levels of wellness. This is because these two fields—massage and fitness—serve to complement one another in a variety of ways.
To better understand the ways in which massage and fitness may work together to promote better health, one might take a closer look at the general goals of both massage and fitness. Beyond the more superficial goals of creating and maintaining a visually appealing body are the core goals of fitness, which may be summed up by saying fitness tends to mean good health. Therefore, any fitness activities one engages in usually are designed to develop and strengthen one’s health.
Broken down into more specific concepts, the goals of fitness could be described as the various benefits of good health. For example, possessing a strong cardiovascular system, capable of sustained endurance, is a common aspect of fitness. By running, jumping rope and taking part in other intense cardiovascular activities, many people seek to pump up their fitness in terms of their hearts and lungs.
Another key goal under the general umbrella of fitness might be increasing lean body mass and decreasing body fat. This can equate to better health in the sense that carrying lean muscle mass is frequently considered better for one’s body than carrying fat. In fact, body fat, especially around the belly, has been linked to quite a few chronic medical conditions, such as diabetes and high blood pressure.
Now that we have a bit of insight into a couple of the main driving forces within the field of fitness, we can turn our attention to massage and see how massage can serve to complement and work with fitness in achieving various health-related goals. For starters, the ability to boost cardiovascular health is something shared by both fitness and massage.
You may be wondering how massage could ever compete with fitness when it comes to increasing cardiovascular health. After all, fitness frequently involves high-intensity movement, whereas massage means relaxing on a table and barely moving at all. However, the fact is massage may help to reduce one’s heart rate and blood pressure through the very act of relaxing the person on the table. Also, massage also has been linked to improved circulation.
When it comes to the act of increasing lean muscle mass, massage once again serves to complement the goals of fitness. Ask anyone who has just started a new fitness regimen that includes resistance training whether or not they are sore, and you are bound to get a resounding yes—at least if their fitness program is somewhat intense.
With aching muscles, it can be hard to get motivated to get back into the fitness groove, and this is where massage comes into play. Massage can help to relieve the aches associated with sports and fitness, so that people can get back into the game or back to the gym sooner rather than later.