How To Use A Massage Gun For Back Pain
Massage guns can be used to help your back pain in three main ways. In this post and video, we’ll be covering how you can use this tool to improve your back pain, as well as enhance the rehabilitation process.
Having used these personally and for years in clinical practice, we know that the use of good quality massage and vibration guns can be great for soft tissue therapy. With back pain, there is always going to be a degree of muscle involvement, whether it is local to the back, or muscle spasm in the hips and legs.
Firstly, we can use the massage gun on the soft tissues of your lower back, taking care to avoid the spine and other bony prominences such as the rips and pelvis. Here the vibration can provide an element of soothing relief. The important thing to note here is that the gun is not fixing your back pain, and certainly not the cause of the problem with your back. But used both in the back or over soft tissues in the legs which are painful, it can provide some moment to moment relief.
It’s important to highlight the point that this is not fixing back pain but helping with some symptomatic relief in a safe way, whilst you work on more effective rehabilitation protocols to strengthen the region and eliminate bad habits that are perpetuating the problem in the lower back.
Be careful when using the vibration or massage gun in this manner that you do not over-do it!
The second way in which these massage guns can help you with your back pain is to enhance the strengthening process. Working with the massage gun to improve muscle tissue quality in the limbs, hips and lower back is a simple way to improve tissue circulation and breakdown of any fibrotic scar tissue in the muscles. It also helps with the removal of waste products from the muscles. If you’re doing the right sort of rehabilitation work, strengthening the muscle tissues, the employment of some effective soft tissue treatment like this can really help. It’s also much more economical than having daily treatments from a professional – not taking anything away from the benefit these professional services can have.
Ultimately, it’s about enhancing the strengthening process, and helping those muscles go through the adaptive growth at a faster rate, which has a positive effect on your lower back.
Finally, you can make use of massage or vibration guns to improve your flexibility and make stretching more effective, combining the vibration gun with a stretch can make some noticeable change almost instantly. As flexibility work becomes relevant later on in your rehabilitation process you can employ this tool to enhance your results.
