Does a Spa Massage really do more than just relax your muscles? Ask this anyone working in the Spa Industry and they will look a bit surprised, because YES of course it does!  So, nice that ¨The Times¨ has now published an article in which it has also really been proven.

Recently the The Times published an article titled “Massage Benefits Are More Than Skin Deep”, in which it explains how researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles conducted a research from which they found that a single session of massage caused biological changes. The study was published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

This is what they did. The researchers from the National Institutes of Health recruited a group of healthy adults and randomly assigned a number of them to a session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other part of the group to a session of light massage. Blood samples were taken before and after the massage.

The persons who received the Swedish massage experienced a significant decrease in the level of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood and at the same time they experienced an increase in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system. The persons who received the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, and also a decrease in cortisol.

The findings were called “very, very intriguing and very, very exciting¨, but is it really that exciting? Is this not already something we knew, especially those who have massages regularly.