Chronic conditions can be complex and less responsive to treatment, but even some of these issues can be resolved in as little as 6 weeks. You may not experience immediate relief from one session, but you should feel the improvement the next day. It may take several sessions to completely eliminate a trigger point. After each session, make sure to drink plenty of water to help flush out waste material from your muscles.
This shows that typical therapy courses will have minimal effect on the number of trigger points. The science behind why some trigger points cause pain and others are just muscle knots is still unknown. Trigger points can be found anywhere in the body, and if they occur in excess, you may experience chronic pain and myofascial pain syndrome. As long as you don't experience any negative reaction, you should massage any trigger point that needs it at least twice a day, and up to six times a day.
Trigger point therapy is a soft tissue treatment that helps release tight and painful knots in the muscles and fascia (connective tissue network). When you try to strengthen or use these affected activation point muscles to perform an activity that they don't do because many fibers are already blocked in the contraction phase and the other fibers are tight and weak. We mentioned earlier that one-off releases and therapies work by disrupting the central positive feedback cycle. You can limit the scan to a small area of muscle tissue around the “epicenter” of symptoms, but some trigger points are surprisingly far from the pain they cause, usually closer to the center of the body.
Trigger points are usually very tender when touched and can refer pain to other parts of the body. Professional help can be beneficial and sometimes necessary, but it can also be beneficial to learn how to avoid trigger points. While latent trigger points rarely cause a person to complain of pain, they can often restrict or distort normal movement patterns and cause stiffness and weakness. Keep in mind that clinical trials they are based on would have considered success as relieving pain rather than eliminating trigger points.
When conducting their clinical trial, they will deliberately use the goal of deactivating trigger points instead of eliminating them. So what are those muscle knots? If the muscle knot seems to persist for a period of time, it's likely what physical therapists call a trigger point. You feel better and tension is released in the muscle, but of course the trigger point is still there and will reactivate when it gets worse.