Massage and Physical Therapy: Better Together
Foundation Physical Therapy has welcomed a licensed massage therapist, Nick Marrs, to our practice. You might think of massage as a tool for relaxing or a special way to treat yourself. Massage does offer those short-term benefits, but there’s so much more! A massage from a trained practitioner, especially in conjunction with physical therapy, can be a powerful tool for healing your body.
Massage: Working the Soft Tissue
Massage targets your body’s soft tissue. Soft tissue includes muscles, fascia, tendons, ligaments, and other connective tissues that support movement. When these tissues are irritated or overloaded, your nervous system often responds by increasing tension—its way of protecting your muscles. Over time, this can limit your mobility, distort your movement patterns, and keep your body’s pain signals turned up.
A trained massage therapist can use a variety of techniques to:
Stimulate a feeling of “safety” in your nervous system that helps your body release tension
Improve sensory feedback, allowing the brain to better “map” the body
Decrease pain signaling
Create temporary windows of improved mobility—critical opportunities for learning new movement patterns
Think of soft tissue work as reducing background “noise” in the system. When that noise is quieter, the brain can receive clearer, more accurate information from the body.
Why Massage Alone Isn’t Enough
Your brain loves efficiency and familiarity. If your body has been compensating for months or years, those compensations are deeply learned patterns—like a well-worn path. Corrective movement during these windows of improved mobility is essential for rewiring the nervous system.
By combining massage and corrective movement, many patients are able to train the nervous system to choose better movement options, improve joint stability and motor control, and enhance body awareness.
Research supports this complementary approach. Studies show that combining manual therapy (including massage techniques) with exercise leads to better outcomes for conditions like low back pain than either intervention alone.
A More Complete Path to Healing
When you’re in pain or recovering from injury, it’s tempting to look for a singular solution. But healing is rarely linear, and no single approach has all the answers.
Massage therapy helps soothe the body, reduce pain, and restore tissue health. Physical therapy corrects movement, builds strength, and helps prevent future problems. Used together—at the right time, in the right order, and with the right goals—they offer a more complete path to healing.
Our goal as a clinic that offers physical therapy and massage is to use these techniques in concert, communicating between providers to help you live above your injuries.