Performance Enhancement Advertisement

I think that massages are often overlooked as a performance enhancement technique to non-athletes. Although many professional athletes do get massages, I think that the general public would find self-massage techniques very effective. For example, a swimmer who has arm pain could greatly benefit from doing a self massage on the arm muscle groups to relieve future pain and to greatly speed up recovery. I think that massage is one of the safest techniques for recovery, if not the safest. People can easily overstretch their muscles and pull a muscle, but with massage, it is quite difficult to damage your muscle as you have full control over the pressure and there is less strain on the muscle. Also, massage does not involve putting any artificial chemicals into your body in contrast to steroids or other enhancement technique. Massage also does not cause damage to your organs and body systems and is generally not a concern for addiction. A lingering question I have is whether it is better to work on sore muscles with more pressure or not, and how big a difference the amount of pressure you use has on the effectiveness and speed of the recovery process.