There are a lot of benefits of massage. It used to be (years ago) that the main benefit of massage was pampering yourself and relaxing. But now days, massage is a viable means of alternative health care and especially for musculoskeletal pain. About 80% of all of mankind's pain comes from the musculoskeletal system. Massage increases your circulation, and when you increase your circulation, the blood carries the healing agent oxygen into the different tissues of the body. So if you are increasing your circulation, you are increasing your oxygen intake to all of your different cells and muscles. Getting things like this to the body is how massage works the best. It also helps the nervous system, as I mentioned, because the spine subluxates and all the nerves come from the brain and go down to the spinal cord, branching out to the spinal foramen. It does everything in your body; it makes your digestion happen, it makes you breathe, and it makes your heart beat and it makes all your muscles work. All the nerves of the nervous system of your body are the electrical system of your body and so when you are moving around, the spine has to move around with it. It has a normal range of motion, otherwise we wouldn't be able to turn, twist and so on and so forth. We turn our head and when we do that a lot of times, we will go beyond the normal range of motion and when we do, and then we pinch off nerves and they don't go back in place; which 85% of them do, but 15% of them do not. So you are pinching off the nerves going to all the different organs of your body, all the different muscles of your body. When the vertebrae subluxate, they pinch off the nerves and when they pinch off the nerves it puts the muscles into a spasm. If the muscles are in a spasm, it pulls a vertebra out further and then it pinches more nerves, and puts more muscles into spasm. So what we do as massage therapist is relax the muscles or the spine. As you relax the muscle and spine, the spine is able to move back into position because the body has an innate power to know where it is supposed to go. If it can get there as we relax the muscles, the spine goes back into place and it takes pressure off the nerves. As it takes pressure off the nerves, it relaxes the muscles more and so it kind of reverses that cycle.
