Everything You Need To Know About Knots

Muscle 'knots' are simply compacted tissue that can develop over time as a result of bad posture, stress, general tension, or scar tissue from an accident. Shoulders, backs, and buttocks are common places to carry a knot. 

 

The extracellular fluid that flows through muscle tissue should be water-like in consistency, giving all of the good nutrients to the cells and helping fibres to glide next to each other. 

 

That fluid can become gel-like due to bad posture, strain, or scar tissue, leading the fibres to clump together and form compressed tissue, often called knots. 

 

Still confused? Time for a food analogy! 

 

Consider healthy muscle fibres to be like dried spaghetti in a packet, all pointing in the same direction and effortlessly gliding around one another. What happens if you cook the spaghetti in a pan and leave it for a while? It becomes knotted and glued together, which is the way we see knots in the tissues. 

There are very few people who get through life without ever experiencing a muscle knot. There are, however, certain risk factors that increase the likelihood of developing muscle knots. These include: 

 

Adhesions, or knots, can be treated by applying heat to the affected area through deep massage, then breaking them up using frictions or cross fibre movements to separate them into smaller pieces. Fibres are realigned and restored to full mobility as a result of the lymph system's removal of waste products triggered by longer, more fluid strokes. You can now move around freely! 

 

Active knots are known as trigger points. These knots of tissue are painful to the touch and can cause other parts of the body to hurt as well. 

 

We can treat them with methods like trigger point therapy, in which we apply localised pressure to a trigger point for a set amount of time before releasing the pressure and therefore allowing blood to flood the area, bringing oxygen and nutrients along with it.