Is muscle knot release a good reason to stretch?
This article is an excerpt from SaveYourself.ca’s ridiculously detailed tutorial about trigger point (muscle knot) self-treatment, which contains more detail about the bath trick, as well as hundreds of other basic and advanced tips and tricks. In Muscle Pain, Simons and Mense are pretty bullish on stretching for trigger points. They propose that “essentially any technique that elongates the muscle out to its full stretch length” constitutes effective treatment for trigger points therein. “A newly activated, single-muscle [my emphasis] myofascial trigger point is usually remarkably responsive to simple stretch therapy,” they write. Stretching “by almost any means is beneficial … At least five ways can be used to augment simple muscle stretch.” Of course, they also mention a few pages later that it has “not been firmly established” that stretching trigger points is helpful, emphasizing that they are making educated guesses. But when experts this credible say that stretching may be effec
