Why my massage therapist, in Valbonne, works more on an area than the one I told him to focus on?

That might seem a bit confusing or counterintuitive!

But sometimes, working on other areas of the body can be an effective strategy to get to the root of the problem and help the area where you’re feeling pain.

Usually there are two reasons why your massage therapist will work on areas other than where you feel pain: compensation and referred pain.

Compensation: for example, if your body is out of perfect alignment, there may be muscles that are tight and bones that aren’t lining up exactly how they’re supposed to.

When that happens, you’ll compensate for the misalignment and adjust the way you walk, which then impacts others areas and causes pain.

Working on muscles connected, even though not directly on the area with pain, may help restore alignment and helps alleviate the pain.

Referred pain: it’s about trigger points.

Trigger points feel like hard lumps in your muscle fibers and often, when pressure is directly applied to them, they cause a pain sensation in another area of the body.

So your massage therapist may apply some pressure in another area than where you feel pain, in order to treat your original pain.

So trust your massage therapist, and don’t feel ashamed to ask him to explain to you, his assessment of the situation and how he choose to treat your problem.

You will learn a lot.

Blue Tree Massage operates in our treatment room in Saint Paul de Vence, and at your home on the French Riviera, mainly in the Alpes Maritimes, in the principal towns along the coast (Cannes, Antibes, Cagnes Sur Mer, Nice, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Villefranche, Monaco, Menton…) as well as further inland (Mougins, Grasse, Valbonne, Biot, Roquefort les pins, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Vence…).