Myotherapy in St Kilda

Going after the source of a stubborn problem

Myotherapy extends what remedial massage does, opening up a wider clinical toolkit, dry needling and prescribed exercise among it, so more obstinate complaints can be treated and chased back to their cause. For anyone based around St Kilda, the clinic is a short ride up the bay in South Melbourne, on the same route 96 line that follows the foreshore.

St Kilda lives outdoors. The beach, the foreshore and the Bay Trail keep people running, riding, swimming and walking all year, and that steady activity brings the familiar overuse pattern with it: the calf that keeps binding, the hip that grumbles after a long ride, the shoulder that never fully came good after a spill. Myotherapy is well matched to precisely this kind of recurring, settled-in complaint.

Where it parts ways with remedial massage

Myotherapy carries all the hands-on work of remedial massage and adds two things to it: dry needling and structured exercise prescription. That extra range is what lets it take on more difficult problems and follow a complaint from the immediate soreness through to the movement habit that keeps producing it.

Treating chronic pain at its root

The pain the clinic concentrates on is usually six months or more old, often without one clear cause, and still present long after the original injury has healed. Rather than keep chasing the symptom, the work looks for the driver beneath, in muscle, nerve, joint or the deeper visceral tissue, and treats that. It is a deliberately wide lens, since the place that hurts is frequently not the place the trouble is coming from.

What a session can call on

• Trigger point release, by hand or by dry needle.
• Myofascial work to restore glide to bound-up connective tissue.
• Cupping to decompress tissue and lift blood flow.
• Dry needling, a fine needle that quiets trigger points and can address several sites at once.
• Prescribed exercise, a personal plan of stretch, strength and coordination that evolves as you improve.

What it commonly helps

• Long-standing back, neck and joint pain.
• Postural imbalance and its knock-on compensations.
• Sport and overuse strains, the running and beach-sport kind common on the St Kilda foreshore included.
• The return to training after an injury.
• Pain that other treatment has not settled.

Your first visit

1. We talk through the history: when it started, how it acts, what aggravates and what eases it.
2. A physical assessment locates the genuine driver, not simply the sorest point.
3. Hands-on treatment follows, aimed at that driver and drawn from the tools above.
4. You leave with a plan, since recovery is a shared effort and takes in the whole person, body and circumstances alike.