Muscle tension is a natural reaction

A natural reaction to mental and physical stress is muscle contraction- and when your muscles stay semi-contracted for a long period of time, pain and stiffness ensue. Furthermore, when your brain perceives mental stress, blood vessels constrict and less blood is able to flow to soft tissues including your muscles. This means less oxygen is reaching the cells within the muscle that need to perform respiration and more waste products are allowed to remain and accumulate. The byproduct of this system is pain or irritation in the muscles and this causes more stress, thus feeding back into the cycle. 

A further danger of prolonged muscle tension

When your muscles are tight, they create a pull on the body which tends to drag spinal joints out of alignment, creating subluxation and painful nerve compression. At our office in Westwood, we are dedicated to detecting the source of your muscle tension: are you chronically stressed out, or constantly sitting with poor posture? While there are a plethora of factors contributing to muscle tension, a discussion often helps get to the real reason. Next we determine where the muscle tension is occurring. Using trigger point therapy, active release and myofascial release modalities, we can release balls of tension and help the muscles relax. 

Resolving muscle tension in Westwood

Chiropractic adjustment corrects subluxation, improves range of motion and boosts circulation. This last part is an essential component of dispelling muscle tension: by facilitating blood flow to a tense region, we oxygenate the muscles which are also able to get rid of waste products such as lactic acid. If you are interested in leaving behind muscle tension for good, give our office in Westwood a call to schedule an appointment today.