Shoon Healthy provides remedial massage as one form of taking care of the body and mind. Promoting self care, stillness and healing through therapeutic touch provided in a safe and professional environment.

Trigger points are defined as “a focus of hyperirritability in a tissue that, when compressed, is locally tender and, if sufficiently hypersensitive, gives rise to referred pain and tenderness.”1 In other words: a trigger point is believed to be a localized spasm or knot in the muscle fiber that may cause pain to be referred to other, more distant parts of the body.

Here is how a trigger point forms: Muscle overload causes an abnormal release of acetylcholine (from dysfunction in motor end plates). This release causes an influx of calcium into the sarcomeres in the affected area which, in turn, causes these sarcomeres to contract. “Because of the sarcomere contraction, there is an increase in the tension of the muscle fiber,” Jurch explains. “This tension creates contraction knots in the short sarcomeres, and these knots evolve into a trigger point. The lengthened sarcomeres along with the contraction knots, referred to as the trigger-point complex, constitutes the taut band in several adjacent fibers.”