Whether you are a professional sportsman or woman, or simply a weekender, there is always the danger of sports injuries, whatever sport you take part in. Physical contact sports such as rugby, boxing, wrestling, and so on can always result in injuries, but sports like football, while not designed to be physical contact sports, can also result in physical contact many, many times during a match.

There are plenty of other sports which can also result in injuries, even though you might at first glance think that it couldn't happen. Take golf, for example. It's a simple sport where you walk through some lovely countryside with a strange stick and hit a small ball with it, perhaps only an inch across, with the object of putting the small ball into a little hole in the grass 200 or 300 yards away. You don't even have to walk. You can use a small buggy and ride instead. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, when you swing that stick you use quite a number of muscles, and if you make a mistake you could damage them. You also walk about five or six miles and you could fall down a rabbit hole and damage your leg. There is even the chance, albeit small, of being struck by a flying golf ball from another player who has hit it incorrectly.

Snooker? Darts? Surely not? Well you are not likely to be struck by anything or come into contact with anyone, but you can suffer from repetitive strain injury by reproducing the same sort of movements over and over – in the case of snooker it can sometimes be for several hours.

You can even suffer very similar injuries to sports injuries without taking part in any sport at all. Just sitting over a laptop all day every day can cause RSI if you are hunched up over it, as many people are. You can damage muscles through gardening – such as digging a large plot over by hand and carrying on even though you know you are tiring, and in some pain, just because you want to get it finished. Many a gardener does that. The same thing applies to painting and decorating and other types of DIY.

This is why sports therapy in London is not just for sportspersons. Massage therapists see people from all walks of life quite regularly with what are typically sports injuries but may have been the result of doing something completely different. However, the good news is that whatever sort of sports-type injury you are suffering, there is an answer, and that is a sports massage.

There are a variety of different massage techniques that can be involved in a sports massage, but it is based on Swedish massage and is a deep tissue type of massage. It can actually sometimes be somewhat painful, but hey! – no pain, no gain! Sports massage therapists will always be on the lookout for the client suffering any sort of pain and will change the type of work that they are doing.

One of the strange results of a sports massage is that you may feel no immediate benefit, but within 24 hours the effects are most definitely noticeable.

Sports therapy includes a number of techniques including kneading which is described by the part of the therapist's hand used, such as thumb kneading, palm kneading, and so on, and the pressure used depends on the bulk of the tissues under treatment. The rate of the movement is also important.

Longitudinal gliding is very important and is administered in the direction of the blood flow, helping to disperse fluids from the point of injury which reduces swelling and inflammation. It also helps to relax muscles which are tight.

Trigger point therapy is another technique that is used to release a tightened muscle that is actually causing pain in another part of the body, which is known as referred pain, the trigger point being the point in the muscle which causes or triggers the pain elsewhere.

There are many other techniques which a massage therapist can use in order to relieve pain, and a skilled therapist will use them selectively in order to achieve the best outcome for the patient.