Trigger Point Therapy: a surprisingly effective, cheap, easy, drug free way to deal with most pain

Twenty some years ago, not too long after I bought my little homestead I was fully engaged in a project to raise the roof on what was the first metals studio here, now known as the old metals studio and becoming known as the wood shed. I had a rust bucket contraption of a mini pick up truck and was loading asphalt shingles into the back of it at the home improvement store. With just a few more packages left on the cart to transfer over one of those bend, lift, twist movements resulted in crippling back pain. “Is this what people mean when they throw their back out,” I wondered? It seemed to take a herculean effort to stand up fully and then still somehow manage to get the remaining shingles in the truck and drive home.

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For anyone who has ever had severe lower back pain, I’m guessing you know what I mean when I say it’s surprising to discover just how much we use our back muscles in normal everyday activities. The pain makes the presence of these muscles known! Those first few days afterward I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tie my shoes! It was many months before I felt like I was back to full strength, without lingering lower back pain whenever I’d be sitting for any period of time. I found to sit in the seat of that rusty pickup and drive around I had to get a pillow or blanket shoved behind my back in such a way as to provide support. I could try and massage my lower back all I wanted but it was of limited help. I suppose I could have gone to the doctor to see if there was anything to be done, but I will admit I strongly avoid the medical system (probably pathologically so) and regardless there’s no way I could have afforded such a thing back then. So it was the long road to recovery.

Many years later, in some thread on some forum, I read about something called trigger point therapy as a cheap, easy, effective way to deal with most soft tissue pain, such as that back pain I had experienced. The book recommended was the 2nd edition of The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook by Davies and Davies.

I decided to buy a copy and see what it was about. I was a bit skeptical but very much liked the idea of it being a self treatment guide, both because I’m just generally a DIY kind of person, and because I lived alone so any guide requiring a second person to massage muscles wasn’t really practical for me.

It seemed intriguing once I got and read it. The basic tools needed were some sort of ball like a hard rubber lacrosse ball and a sock. I had the sock already and for a few bucks I got a pack of lacrosse balls. (The sock is to put the ball in and toss over your back to access those difficult to reach places. You position the ball in the sock between your body and a wall, leaning into the wall to provide the pressure.) Combining those with the book I was all set to deal with what the authors said was the primary cause of roughly 75% of pain, and a contributing factor in most of the rest. This seemed like an outrageous claim, but I think my total dollar outlay at the time was less than 20 bucks so it seemed worth the risk of trying. I don’t know that $20 would even get me in the door of a doctor’s office!

Some time later, my back, which always remained a bit sensitive to reinjury after that first episode went out again while lifting a piece of firewood. Particularly annoying was the fact that it wasn’t even a large piece of firewood! Anyway, I hobbled back inside wondering if the trigger point therapy would work on this or not. It was pretty serious pain, of the type that took months to heal previously. I’d messed around with trigger points for minor issues since getting the book, and it seemed to help, but I was never sure if it was really the therapy helping or just the fact that it was a minor issue which would have gotten better quickly anyway. This back pain I knew from that past experience, and I knew I’d be suffering from it for weeks at least.

The interesting thing about trigger points are that they don’t tend to be located where the pain is felt. Thus you can spend all the time you want massaging the location of the pain trying to ease and relax the muscle, but often that isn’t the muscle which is really the problem. Rather what you are generally feeling is referred pain from another muscle that has knotted up forming a trigger point.

The book is excellent in helping to guide you to the exact location of most trigger points for particular regions of pain. With my newly reinjured back I got the book and found the section for lower back pain. It lists the muscles where the trigger point could be, starting with the most common culprits and working down to the rare problems. After years of experience using this guidebook on myself I have to say it tends to be right on! Usually I find my problem is in the first or second muscle listed. In this case the most likely cause was listed as the gluteus medius which was in fact the location of my issue. The section on the gluteus medius then describes the symptoms with diagrams of where the pain is generally felt, along with the sorts of activites that usually cause the trigger points to form. For me it was all right on target.

The treatment involved using the lacrosse ball rolled with pressure across the trigger points a few times, several times a day. That was it! In this instance I was back to normal in about 3 days! It was like a miracle cure! Mind you this isn’t always that effective. Again years later while playing with heavy rocks, as I like to do, I did a lift and twist with a boulder that was just too heavy and there went the back again. The trigger point therapy certainly helped reduce my pain, but that time it was still a few weeks before I was back to full strength.

What brought this all to mind recently was a friend needing my help to drive him to a medical pain clinic for a spinal shot. (That just sounds painful!) He’s having some serious pain issues likely resulting from injury to a nerve in the process of one of his surgeries for a seriously shattered ankle. The night before I thought of this book which generally sits ignored and forgotten on my shelf since I don’t have many pain issues. Given all his body has had to deal with in the past few months with a cast, crutches, and trying to rebuild the muscles afterward since the ankle break I’d be shocked if he didn’t at least have some trigger points formed adding to his pain issues. So that day I reminded him of this book which I’d shared with him before.

I also brought my copy of the newer 3rd edition along to read while sitting in the waiting room as he had his procedure. I was referencing it for myself. See my biggest problem is that I tend to not even get it off the book shelf to check when I have pain issues, thinking the pain will just go away soon, and to be fair it often does. However, I’ve been having pain and stiffness in my left thumb for a while now. Part of me was wondering if this was what the beginning of arthritis felt like. It wasn’t awful, but I wasn’t looking forward to it being a regular part of my life. Sometimes I’m such a dope! Why didn’t I go and look it up in my book much sooner since I know it almost always at least helps if not cures whatever pains I seem to get?

This particular issue is a bit more complicated, seeming to involve several muscles. I found trigger points in my opponens pollicis and adductor pollicis. Working these provided relief of much of my thumb pain immediately. However, those don’t seem to be the whole issue. It may be I just have to keep working them longer. However, searching more it seems like there’s another potential culprit in my brachialis muscle located in my upper arm. I’m going to start working that one to see if it does the trick in healing all the issues, thus eliminating all the pain.

I tend to view pain not as the problem itself, but rather my body screaming to get my attention to deal with the real problem. Thus I’m always very reluctant to take any sort of painkilling drugs for fear that I’ll just be dulling the senses, allowing me to cause even more damage at the actual source of the pain. Of course, I’m not trying to tell anyone how they need to live. I don’t know what the issues are for others, or the level of pain tolerance they have. Though I do generally think it’s best to find and cure the source of the pain if at all possible.

For me this book has been absolutely stellar in helping me find and treat the source of almost all the aches and pains I get which reach a level high enough for me to get off my lazy, and sometimes trigger point filled, butt to get out the book and look it up. I really should be grabbing it the moment I begin to feel a new pain since it’s not like it’s hard to work through the indexes to narrow down and pinpoint the likely causes. I can generally do this in just a few minutes. This therapy can work for all sorts of pain too, from the back pain, and thumb pain I wrote about here, to the stiff neck I often get due to trigger points in my back trapezius muscle as a result of spending so much time leaning my head forward over my work while chasing. Trigger points can also be the cause of headaches, and apparently even toothaches, along with much much more!

I’ve recommended The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook to many people over the years, loaning out copies which I never seemed to get back. Hence my first copy of the 2nd edition is gone which I replaced with the newer 3rd edition. I do like the newer edition a bit better. It’s basically the same as far as I can tell except that it has an easier to use layout of reference images for locating the source of your pain and likely trigger points. That said, the older version is perfectly workable and if you are looking to get the book, but save a bit of money, there seems to be a quirk in the marketplace. On Amazon the hardcover version of the 2nd edition is usually super cheap as opposed to the softcover version.

For me I consider this book an indispensable part of first aid supplies for any home. It’s like an owners manual for you body, tailor made for diagnosing the sources of most pain. For the wealth of highly useful knowledge it provides, this book to me is crazy, stupid cheap! If you get used copies of the older version it’s probably less money than a bottle of aspirin or whatever your favorite over the counter painkiller is.

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is one of my secrets to living a fulfilled, yet low cost lifestyle. When I get pain I first try to deal with it myself by fixing the root cause instead of relying on drugs to mask the pain and likely cause other side effects I’d have to deal with later. This book is something which has helped to empower me in taking ownership and responsibility of my body.

Mind you I’m not saying there is no place for medical professionals. The worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life was from a tooth, and that was not the result of a trigger point. I most definitely needed a dentist to deal with that issue, a massive cavity in a wisdom tooth which ended up being pulled. I just strongly recommend everyone having this book as a reference to start with when issues arise. Please seek professional help if warranted!

When the book came to mind again recently I realized I was doing all of you who read my blog a disservice by not sharing it with you since it has become such a significant tool I use to stay well and avoid needing costly doctor visits. I hope you give it a try, and I sincerely hope it can be as useful for you as it has been to me for many years now.

Studio Snippet

Since my last post I’ve resumed work on various pieces in the studio. I thought today I’d share this piece I’ve had at the chasing stump. I just finished up the first course of work were I established the lines and pushed the planes back to form these largish terraced areas. There will be an additional layer of design developed on these terraces later. I want to push the depth of them more first though.

In order to do another course of chasing needed to push these deeper I first need to anneal the metal, as it has become work hardened. Annealing is a process of heating the metal to reform the crystalline structure, making it soft and malleable again. First though I need to melt the inner supporting wax out. To do this I get the vessel propped upside down so I can slowly heat from below, giving the melting wax an easy, free escape route to drip down into the collection tray. Towards the end there is usually a plug of wax that drops down too. Then as I burn off the remaining wax film I am annealing it at the same time.

Once it has been cleaned up in the pickle I’ll refill it with wax and resume my chasing work.

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