Self care should be an important part of your everyday routine. Like pressing your shirts, brushing your teeth, and combing your hair, setting aside some time every day to stretch or give your tired joints and strained muscles a little attention is imperative to easy movement and staying mobile. Do you clench your jaw when you’re stressed? Are you standing on your feet for too long every day? Finally starting to feel all those tens of thousands of emails and mouse-clicks over the years? It’s time to take a step back and start focusing on all those little problem areas.
Tennis Ball Foot Massage
This simple massage takes just a few minutes a day and will relieve pain in one of the most vital parts of our body—our feet. The stress and pain you get from standing in uncomfortable shoes for extended periods of time don’t just affect the outer softer tissue of your feet, but also manifest deeper into the muscle and even ligament layers of the foot. If ignored for too long, this pain and strain could result in serious injuries and complications. This massage isn’t just beneficial to the feet, either. You have a ton of nerves down there, which means massaging them also benefits your nervous system and even your brain. Link
Tension Headache Relief
Tension headaches are absolutely brutal, and can make all the difference between an easy productive day, and a martini-necessitating nightmare. These techniques center around the base of the neck, the tender points in and around the nose and eyebrows, as well as the temple. They recommend using a tennis ball so that constant pressure is applied to the strained areas, but you’re also free to use your thumbs and index fingers, too. What we love most about this guide is that these are all super simple and proven ways to immediately relieve pressure point tensions, and that they can be done effectively in just a couple minutes—from the comfort of your desk, workstation, bed, shower, etc. Link
Jaw Clenching
You may not realize it, but there are quite a few muscles, tendons, and joints in your face. If you clench your teeth in your sleep or when you’re stressed, the constant pressure could lead to some pretty bad side effects. Some, more immediate, like tension headaches and other muscle fatigue; and others more prolonged, like damage to the teeth. This guide discusses several techniques to massage the joints and muscles most commonly affected by jaw clenching in order to provide immediate relief to stressed areas. It even goes as far as talking about warming up the fascia muscles, mobilizing your jaw joint, releasing specific tension, etc. Link
Piriformis (Butt) Muscle Tennis Ball Massage
Who doesn’t love a good butt rub? Most importantly, who doesn’t love good mobility? This massage is designed to kill two birds with one stone, and in the process, help ensure you’re properly stretching your hip joints, and getting all the butt rubbing you need. There aren’t a lot of pictures, but the guide is pretty self-explanatory. If you need some video help, here’s an excellent (and SFW) reference. Link
Neck and Shoulder Massage
A good tissue massage in the neck and shoulder areas is an excellent way to relieve stress and tension from the pressure points that physically affect us most. This quick guide provides a step-by-step and super easy routine to help relax your neck and shoulders, bring fresh blood to the area, and keep you working and productive, even when things are tense. Link
Hand and Wrist Massage
Laugh all you want, but the truth is, we aren’t getting any younger. Joint pain and even Carpal Tunnel Syndrome are very real concerns for older guys, and while a good hand and wrist massage might not alleviate all of our issues, it’s a damn good place to start. This guide, from WikiHow provides a simple and carefully illustrated 14-step guide to giving your hands and wrists a complete deep tissue massage to help ensure your hands and joints stay nimble and ready to work. It’s all fun and games until you can’t hold a fork anymore. Link
Elbow Massage/Forearm Massage
Whether you’re stuck in an office typing away on a computer all day, or just see yourself getting slower on the back nine of your local golf course, elbow joint pain can be nothing short of excruciating. Your elbow is a particularly problematic point because all the muscles on the back of your forearm combine into a single, very thick tendon. Unfortunately, over time and through prolonged strain on the joint and tendons in the forearm, problems can—and often do—arise, usually before it’s too late. Even if you aren’t feeling any pain or joint discomfort, these self-massages are important to keep in mind. It’s a pretty long explainer, but definitely worth the time to read. Link
Temple Massage
When you’re on the go and just have a few minutes to massage some key areas, nothing works better on as many different areas as a simple temple massage. This guide takes you through the process of giving yourself an all-encompassing temple massage, with the end-game being to relieve immediate tension in one of the most important—and vulnerable—areas of your body. Of course, it goes into a little more detail than just rubbing your temples with your thumbs, focusing also on the brow bones and around the eyes. More than that, it also discusses the use of aromatherapy and essential oils to help the massages work better and keep those areas from becoming too tense in the future. Link
