hi my name is Felicia I'm the massage therapist at PhysioChiroWellness in
Mississauga. I'm coming to you guys today because we had a couple questions
regarding headaches so I want to come to you guys today and answer a few
questions regarding tension headaches so what I'm specifically going to talk
about is trigger points. So a lot of times people have headaches that have
specific referral pain patterns like some people may feel at the top of their
head this side so I'm going to go into a little bit more detail of how we could
help us this with those different types of headaches
so with trigger point headaches sometimes you have little trigger points
in your muscles that can get aggravated by tension of overusing the muscle
for example for your neck or moving your head around so a lot of the
tension will literally sit in those neck muscles those trigger points so what we
can do as massage therapists is literally go in and release those
trigger points like literally getting inside the muscle and releasing the
trigger point so to stretch out the muscle. So one of the things that - trigger
points are common for most people but not the exact same for every single
person so the first example I'm going to go through is the temporalis muscle
which said to be a common muscle with TMJ. So what like with
the temporalis muscle which is this muscle really at the side of the head
here a lot of people tend to get referral pain into the side so you can
see where these X's are is where the trigger point would be, so massage
therapy would really focus into these trigger points it'll feel like really
tense are really sensitive if you focus into these areas here and
releasing that will release a lot of this referral pain that you feel that
could feel like a headache so I'm gonna move on also to one that is very common
with a lot of people who work in offices who sit down majority of the day is this
upper trapezius trigger point. So what happens is these muscle same thing like
our other one I was just telling you about the upper traps they have these
two spots here that tend to get really tight and really tense from just
constantly having our shoulders up in the air or working over a laptop so we
tend to get this referral pain up around the ears and behind the eye so
a lot of people tend to rub their eye a lot of the times and feel like they have
this headache literally and usually it stays on the one side so if you do have
the trigger point on your right side the referral pain pattern will then
translate to the right eye so that's a really common one that we end up
treating in massage therapy so now we're gonna move on to the third image that
you see here which is going to really reflect the sternocleidomastoid muscles
so this is a muscle that you do often see at the side of your neck if you're
looking at it from both sides it will be more of a V pattern but we're just
looking at the side image for now so in the sternocleidomastoid we have two
parts of the muscle so if you have the trigger points within this part of the
muscle where you have these x's it doesn't have to be all it could just be
one or it could be a combination it's different for everybody it depends on
your posture so definitely if you have a forward neck carriage you could do you
definitely do see this more protruding more so so the tension that will build
will create activate these trigger points that will refer more of this
pattern more into the face which and then also to the top of the head as well
so it all depends on where you feel the tension or the referral pain that won't
make that headache so now moving on to a very common one as well is the
sub-occipitals here so that will be reflected in this pink pattern here so
these sub-occipitals are located right at the base of the skull so right at the
bottom of the neck just quite a few muscles probably about eight of them
these ones when they get tight they're really tiny muscles and when the trigger
point literally sits in these muscles it's really nice to get that relief with
through massage therapy to massage into this area here so you'll see that
reflected in a more of a headache pattern that literally goes through the
side of your head mainly in the ear here but the side of this head so going into
massage therapy and really releasing these trigger points really releases a
lot of the headaches and relaxes everything, so massage
therapy is definitely something that could help with these trigger points
here so that was it if you have any more questions feel free to come by our
Mississauga location and book an appointment if you have any questions
also he could contact us via our website or give us a call and we'll be happy to
help you. Alright see you guys soon