When the muscles in your back or neck tense up, it can be paralyzing. Plus, it’s difficult to figure out where the pain originated. Reaching back, you might feel small lumps in the area that hurt when you press down. Where did those come from?

Maybe someone tells you to go get a massage—something to work out the “knots.”
But, wait! Before you make an appointment anywhere, it’s important to know what you’re in for.

Trigger point is a type of massage therapy targeting areas of the muscles that have contracted and formed small, fibrous nodules that are tender to the touch, sometimes referred to as “knots.” Pressing on these points can also produce pain in other areas, sometimes quite a distance from the point of origin. This is called “referred pain.”

Unlike other types of massage that may involve the whole body, trigger point massage focuses on these specific areas by applying isolated pressure on the point, followed by release.