Why is it, when I’m getting (or giving) a massage, that when you find the little hard bumps that seem to be the source of pain, they move? What exactly are these bumps and how can they seemingly move several inches?
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According to my mom, massage therapist for many, many years, these are parts of the muscle that are constricted even when you are relaxing the muscle. Massage moves blood in and out of these areas, relaxing them.
Lactic acid. It builds up when your muscles work without enough oxygen. Massaging and stretching brings oxygen to the site and breaks it down
A lot of them are where the fascia (tissue structure between muscle and skin) and muscle have stuck together. Fascia is the part of our bodies that keeps the skin in place and not sliding around so it needs to be sticky. Sometimes though, it gets so sticky that it creates an adhesion, AKA “knots”.
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It’s funny since I’ve been getting massages for years (I go to one of the student massage schools) and how each persons technique is different, had several who needed to put serious pressure to make it release, and others who attack it differently and use almost no pressure
Of course I always tell the girls that if need be, the can climb on the table and use there full weight if need be to get through all the fat 🙂
Muscle knots are typically referred to as ‘trigger points’ in the industry. This can sometimes be true, but not always. A true trigger point will refer pain (trigger) across, through, away from, or adjacent to its location, either passively or when massaging, and often both.
Some call them myofascial adhesions. The study of fascia is still relatively sparse, but recent literature on the topic is quickly growing. Put very simply, fascia is the “skin” for your internal tissues. When fascia becomes dehydrated, damaged, or otherwise immobile, it will lead to an adhesion, or a “stuck” point that should otherwise freely move.
The nodule that is felt when most people talk about their knots, is actual muscle fiber, again that has become dehydrated, malnourished, damaged, or injured, and has lost the ability to relax to its natural composition. Another leading cause, and likely the most common, is posture. When certain muscle groups are strained by being chronically shortened, lengthened, underused or imbalanced to their antagonist, a knot can form to prevent a more serious type of damage. The primary driver of formation is neurological and a much more complicated topic.
Every single person I’ve ever worked with has had several knots, trigger points, or myofascial complications in several regions.
They move around when massaging because muscle tissue is very flexible. The knot is in the muscle, so just as you can press into your bicep and the tissues rebound, so will the knot when you contact it.
They are knots of constricted muscle. As you put pressure on them they will release and open up. The more you massage as an activity the easier it becomes to feel them and work them to release. My wife is a Massage Therapist.
So, gonna upset a lot of people with this one but:
They’re nothing. Well, they are definitely not trigger points, tense muscles, “knots” of muscles, or anything concrete or clinically relevant. They are probably just tendons and normal variations of muscle. Practitioners of various disciplines like massage, chiro, physio, etc. can’t even reliably identify such “knots.” ([See here.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28098584/)) Further, these kinds of areas are not clinically associated with any reliable effect–lots of people with “knots” have no pain and lots of people with pain have no identifiable knots. ([See here for example.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20015697/))
At the end of the day, it’s a pseudoscientific concept that catches our “hey that makes sense” button but actually has no evidence to support it.
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