In this video I am going to share with you some amazing benefits of massage for faster recovery, pain relief, increased growth hormone, stress relief, relaxation and general well being.

Regular massage helps improve overall health by pacifying the nervous system and balancing the hormonal systems. It improves the integration between the nervous system and endocrine system.

Here are some oils for various body types and conditions:

1.  Sesame oil is heating, heavy and has penetrating qualities – best for Vata and Kapha types, people who tend to feel cold, have dry skin, cracking or popping joints.

2.  Coconut and sunflower oil is more cooling and best for Pitta types, feel very hot, during the hot season, for inflammed, red, hot tissues.

3.  Restore Oil for pain relief, reducing swelling, cracking, popping joints, tendonitis, arthritis

Tweetables:

How To Recover Faster and help boost GH  [Click To Tweet]
Speed Healing: Remedies To Heal Faster [Click To Tweet]
Regular Improves the Integration between the Nervous System and Endocrine System  [Click To Tweet]

Transcript

Hey guys, this is Manu Kalia, physical therapist and Ayurveda herbalist. So today I wanted to share with you benefits of massage. And so I have been recommending my patients do massage for themselves or have massage done to them for quite a while now, and the specific type of massage we’re going to talk about is Ayurvedic massage called abhyanga, which is a massage with herbal oils or oil in general, and the herbal is more of a delivery mechanism to deliver herbs via the oil into the tissue and the oil itself has its own healing properties. And different oils or different herbal oils are used for people with different constitutions and also for certain conditions, but I’m just going to give you a general overview also about the benefits of massage itself.

If you can have somebody do the massage for you, even self-massage done for 15 to 20 minutes a day or even every other day, it has amazing and tremendous benefits for the system, and not just from the standpoint of healing and for injuries but also for recovery. If you’re an athlete or if you’re working out or trying to get in better condition, whether build more muscle or for that matter improve endurance or just general well-being and overall health, massage is great for that. In fact, I would say, as I’ve said in some of my previous videos also, that the actual exercise or actual activity that you’re doing should be 25, 30% or even about 50%, I would say, but good bulk of the rest of the time has to be spent on other things you can do for yourself to improve recovery time and just improve the overall functioning of the system, and so massage is a great tool you can use for yourself.

So what are some of the benefits of doing massage for you? And one of the main things is it’s stress reduction, and specifically with that, it reduces the amount of cortisol, which is a stress hormone in your system, which will help reduce the breakdown of the body and also some of the things you might have read. A lot of you guys might have read increase in weight gain is due to increase in cortisol in your system, so reducing cortisol in your body and improvement of other hormones such as oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine, all of these hormones, affect the mood, and they are the feel-good hormones and so they are also very important for overall health of the system and how you feel. It is also beneficial for improving growth hormone in the body. So increased growth hormone will lead to reduction in fat, improvement in muscle mass and just overall recovery of the system.

So I think the benefits to doing massage are great. It’s almost like the massage is an integration of your nervous system as well as the endocrine system, your endocrine system being all the hormones that are functioning in your body, so it’s like a bridge between those two systems. So you balance out those two systems, your body will function better. So the massage will affect the nervous system in terms of settling down, pacifying the nervous system. And the endocrine system, which is a hormonal system, as I mentioned, reduction in the stress hormones, the feel-good hormones, and your growth hormone. So it improves the overall functioning of the endocrine system also, which is really important for recovery especially after if you’re playing sports or athletic activities and just for overall well-being.

Now, the actual act of doing massage itself will also improve circulation in the body and lymphatic flow, so clearing up toxins out of the body. And even the friction of massage increases the heat in the local region, which opens up channels, so removes waste products back into circulation so they can be excreted out, affecting the hormonal system, affecting nervous system, improving circulation, removal of waste products and toxins out of the body. So as you can see, there are lots and lots of benefits to doing massage.

So how often should you be doing massage? Massage can be done, as I said, you can use just regular oil or you can use…I mean, there are also dry massage techniques too, but I think different oils have different therapeutic qualities, so it also affects the system in that way. And then, it can be done for about, if you’re doing self-massage, 15 to 20 minutes. If you have more time, you can do it for longer periods. And for people with busy schedules, even if you do it two to three times a week, it’d be great. And wait about a half-hour to about an hour and then take a warm shower so the heat in itself opens up the pores and drives the oil deeper into the tissues.

And it can also affect with, as I said, stress management and better sleep for you. So if you’re sleeping better and you have less stress in the system, psychological as well as physical stress, it will also affect your immunity too. So it increases the ability of the system or improves the immunity of the system to fight disease and infections and all sorts of things.

So I think it’s a great tool that you can implement in your daily life, and if you want to learn more about massage and the specific oils to be used for improving the health of the system, I’ll post the oils for specific constitutions and also for certain conditions and different oils or herbal oils that are really good for a lot of those things, whether it’s for pain management or just to strengthen the system or for a calming effect. So I’ll list a bunch of those oils in this video, so check out the video on my site and it’s TridoshaWellness.com.

If you have any questions leave a comment. Thank you.