Trigger Point Therapy:
What is it?

Trigger point therapy is something that I stumbled upon while searching for a cure to tennis elbow.  It helped me a ton to recover from my tennis elbow and since then I have used it cure other aches and pains that I’ve developed.

The trigger point therapy practice was developed by western medical doctors Janet Travell and David Simons.  The core idea is that when overworked or stressed, muscles develop hard, painful spots called ‘Trigger Points’.  These trigger points sometimes hurt right at the location of the point, and sometimes they refer the pain to another location.  Simple, but amazing.

Trigger points are defined in Janet Travell’s magnum opus The Trigger Point Manual as, “A highly irritable localized spot of exquisite tenderness in a nodule in a palpable taut band of muscle tissue.” However, if you’ve ever asked someone to rum your shoulders and had them find, “Just that spot right there…to the left…oh, ouch, ok lighter…oooohhhhhh…” then you know what a trigger point is. 

The referred pain part of trigger points is the other interesting thing about them.  One example is that part of my tennis elbow pain was caused by stiff and knotted muscles between my shoulders from putting too much strain on my upper back while doing swordsmanship.  Without adequate directions, it can be easy to mistake a trigger point muscle problem for something much worse.

What you need is an outline of the different muscles that can refer pain to the back of your elbow, where the trigger points are located, and how to treat them.  Which is what the rest of these articles are for.  Use the Trigger Point Index to track down what muscles contribute or create your elbow pain.

For tennis elbow, trigger point therapy can be a godsend.  I know it worked great for me, and really speeded my recovery.  There’s lots of good scientific information out there about trigger points in the Links, and excellent info about how to treat your pain here.

• Cure Pain Through Trigger Point Massage!
• Trigger Points can Cure Tennis Elbow?
• The Tennis Elbow Trigger Point Index