Expert guidance on sports massage, muscle recovery and pain relief, written for real people, with real bodies and real lives.
Running · 2 min read · Featured
From marathon preparation to post race recovery, sports massage is one of the most effective tools a runner can use. Everything you need to know about timing, frequency and what to expect.
Read ArticleRunning · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Running is one of the best things you can do for your body, and one of the most demanding. Every stride places significant load through your calves, hamstrings, hip flexors, IT band and lower back. Over the course of a training block this accumulates, muscles tighten, movement patterns shift, and the body starts compensating. This is where most running injuries come from.
Sports massage addresses these imbalances directly. Used well, it doesn't just help you recover. It helps you perform better, stay injury free and extend your running career. The most common mistake: waiting until something hurts before booking.
Desk Workers · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
When you sit for extended periods, your hip flexors shorten and tighten. At the same time, your glutes effectively switch off from lack of use. This combination tilts the pelvis forward, flattens the lumbar curve, and puts the lower back under constant load it wasn't designed to handle.
Meanwhile, your head moves forward. For every inch your head moves in front of your shoulders, the effective weight your neck and upper back muscles have to support increases dramatically. The result: tight chest, weak upper back, forward head position, and a lower back that's chronically overloaded.
Key point: Desk related back pain is almost always a muscle imbalance problem. Stretching the bit that hurts rarely fixes it, because the pain is usually reacting to tightness somewhere else.
A focused session targets the tight areas driving the imbalance, typically the hip flexors, chest, upper traps and suboccipitals, rather than just the area that hurts. Most desk worker clients notice significant improvement after a single session. For an ongoing issue, 2–3 sessions close together followed by monthly maintenance is the most effective approach.
Education · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Sports massage is a broad term describing massage designed around the demands of physical activity, combining Swedish massage, deep tissue work, trigger point therapy and stretching with the goal of improving performance and addressing muscle imbalances. It's not just for athletes. The approach is systematic and performance focused, which benefits desk workers and drivers just as much as runners.
Deep tissue massage refers specifically to work targeting the deeper layers of muscle and connective tissue, using slower, more deliberate strokes. It's particularly effective for chronic tension and areas that have built up significant adhesions over time. It isn't automatically harder or more painful — it's about working at the right depth for the tissue that needs addressing.
In practice, a skilled therapist uses both. At Supreme Sports Therapy, sessions draw on whatever combination of techniques is most appropriate for your body at that time. Rather than worrying about the label, describe what you're experiencing and the right approach follows from that.
Recovery · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Signs you need to book sooner than planned: a niggle that's been present more than a week, reduced range of motion that doesn't resolve with rest, pain affecting sleep or training, or after the event stiffness lasting longer than usual. Early intervention is almost always faster and cheaper than waiting for a problem to fully develop.
Pain Relief · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Rest reduces inflammation, which reduces pain. But it does nothing to address the muscle imbalances or movement patterns that created the problem. As soon as you return to normal activities, the same forces act on the same weaknesses and the pain returns. This is why people describe back pain as "coming and going for years".
Rather than treating where it hurts, effective treatment identifies what's driving the pain. For most lower back complaints this means releasing the hip flexors and thoracic spine and restoring movement patterns throughout the whole posterior chain. Most clients with chronic lower back pain see significant improvement within 2–3 focused sessions.
Getting Started · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Treatments · 2 min read
By Nick Monczakowski · Supreme Sports Therapy, New Malden
Unlike rigid sports tape, RockTape is elastic, stretching up to 180% of its original length. When applied to the skin, it lifts the tissue slightly, reducing compression on underlying structures, improving circulation and helping with pain management. It also provides proprioceptive feedback, a subtle sensory cue that helps the body move more efficiently.
RockTape isn't a cure. It's an adjunct to massage, providing support between sessions so the work done in treatment carries through into daily life. If taping is appropriate for your situation, it's applied at the end of your session.