How Sports Massage Heals Sore Muscles
By Dennis Lisaius – Director & Senior Therapist at LA Sports Massage
As a dedicated sports massage therapist it doesn’t take much to provoke my elevator speech about the benefits of sports massage for athletes.
For this week’s Wellness Wednesday 
we’re featuring a guest post from our good friend Bill Lockton. This post is the third and last in a series of posts from Bill to help you deal with sports injuries.
HOW TO CARE FOR SPORTS INJURIES – by Bill Lockton
Part 3: Uncovering the Cause – and trying to fix it!
In Part 1 of this series we discussed ways of treating the symptoms of your injury so that it heals quickly and limits you as little as possible. In Part 2 we discussed how to manage the injury so that you might still be able to do your activity to some extent, and what to do if you can’t. Today we’re going to look at why you got injured in the first place to see if we can discover how to avoid being injured again in the future.
Read more…
Today’s Wellness Wednesday is a guest post 
about how to stay motivated, by our friend, elite marathoner and coach Gary Stoltz.
Motivation!
One of the biggest challenges for both beginning and elite athletes is moving from the comfort of the sofa to stepping out the door as you begin the workout. You can have the best of intentions to work out, but once you get comfortably seated with your legs propped up, it’s tough to then go change and get your workout in. Here are some tips to help you get off the sofa and out the door!
Without a doubt, the most common complaint people
have is low back pain. Something about modern life stresses our backs. Maybe it’s the shape of car or airplane seats. Maybe it’s stress. Or maybe it’s being on a computer for hours every day. Whatever the cause, there are things we can do for ourselves to lessen that tight aching low back pain.
What do I suggest? Well first, you ought to be foam rolling your back. Check out our post Foam Rolling Basics. Second, ice any painful areas for 20 minutes (every 2 hours if you can manage it.) And of course you need to stretch it.
Painful, and often agonizingly slow to heal, 
shin splints are the bane of many an athlete. Coupled with R.I.C.E. (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation) and sports massage, foam rolling the calf muscles can often provide relief and a return to sport.
For this week’s Wellness Wednesday we’re featuring a guest post from our good friend Bill Lockton. This post is the second in a series of three from Bill to help you deal with sports injuries.
HOW TO CARE FOR SPORTS INJURIES – by Bill Lockton
Part 2: Managing the Condition
Last time we talked about treating the symptoms, and next time we’ll talk about uncovering the cause of the problem and trying to fix it. In this section, we’ll investigate managing the condition.
It was a smashing success!
Sunday afternoon LA Sports Massage hosted its first workshop in over a year. Dennis Lisaius, Director and Senior Therapist at LA Sports Massage, led the crowd of LA Legger members though a series of foam roller maneuvers designed to help them learn Self Myofascial Release- a nifty kind of self massage that uses the athlete’s own body weight as the pressure to provide massage strokes.
When incorporated into your workout routine, stretching regularly can increase your range of motion, flexibility, mobility and circulation. Stretching also provides an excellent “bridge” between inactivity and vigorous activity.
Here are 8 simple tips to help you stretch effectively:
Because the IT band is a long fibrous band 
that runs down the side of the leg starting at the hip and ending below the right side of the knee, it can often be the root of a variety of problems that athletes experience. Using a foam roll consistently at home can help resolve existing issues and minimize future problems. It’s a simple, easy action you can do at home.
As you probably can guess by the name of the post,
we seek to bring you a new stretch each Sunday. That way you can practice it and add it to your stretching arsenal for the rest of the week.
This Sunday Stretch we’re going to work on the deep gluteal muscle group. There are six of them, aka the “deep six”, that lie beneath the more superficial gluteous maximus and gluteous medius. Now, mind you, those deeper muscles aren’t called glute muscles in any anatomy text. But they are in the gluteal region so lets just go with it.
