Beyond Sports Medicine: Injury Prevention and Care Through Sports Massage.

This text is designed as a reference source and is intended to provide an overview of sports massage techniques and applications. The author describes the field of sports massage as the "wave of the future." The text provides a manual of techniques intended for all sports-oriented individuals such as coaches, athletes, and health professionals and offers a special emphasis for massage therapists.

This text covers a range of topics including massage technique descriptions, technique effects, phases of treatment, acute and chronic injury management, spinal exercises, stress management, and self-help exercises for various anatomical areas. Each topic is presented for easy reading with minimal technical information. The text offers illustrations that depict the various techniques described. This book is not designed to provide recipe treatments; the author encourages the therapist to understand and develop an individual protocol for each case. Multiple techniques ranging from proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation to counterstrain exercises are described and are well illustrated, which is helpful when preparing a protocol.

The text's organization, however, is confusing. The first two thirds of the book are orderly and directed toward the therapist. The last one third awkwardly vacillates in direction, at once speaking to the athlete and then suddenly to the therapist. The subject matter is also disrupted in this last third, in that a chapter on searching for an appropriate school of massage is randomly inserted before a chapter on self-help exercises for the athlete. Perhaps an appendix including massage school selection would have been more appropriate.

The author presents a good understanding of therapeutic massage techniques and makes many statements as to the effects of sport massage. No documentation to support these statements appears in the text, and references are few and incomplete. The author also failed to include a table of references, a bibliography, or an index.

Examples of incomplete and poorly documented references are "...the physiologist deVries attributed muscular soreness following extreme exertion to localized muscle spasm" and "...Russian therapists have developed a special petrissage technique, that itself helps grow muscle mass, according to Zhenya Kurashova Wine of the Kurashova Institute for Studies in Physical Medicine." These are controversial statements that need proper references.

Some of the information presented is confusing and seemingly contradictory. The author compliments Dr Cyriax for the development of transverse friction massage (TFM), an important technique used in sports massage, and recommends its use on most muscles, healthy or not (contrary to Cyriax's guidelines in which TFM should only be used on a lesion). Counterstrain techniques and approximation techniques are oversimplified, which creates difficulty in determining when their use is appropriate and exactly how they are performed. A section on treating "problem" muscles is presented with no description, definition, or assessment of the "problem." Even with no diagnosis of the "problem," the author does not issue a medical disclaimer when outlining the various techniques.

In summary, this text addresses a new and exciting treatment regimen that is becoming increasingly popular in this age of fitness.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this text for the physical therapy clinician. The lack of documentation and a list of references prohibits the reader from fully understanding the effects and benefits of sports massage. The clinician needs to know why and how the techniques work, either from sound scientific research or at least from multiple other therapists' experience working in the field. if revised with proper documentation, references. bibliography, index, and improved organization, this text could be useful to the clinician.