Body Fix Therapy
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BodyFix Therapy, a Sports Massage and Rehabilitation practitioner based in oxford. With over 10 year Do you feel the effects of stress and your job?
"North Oxford’s #1 professional Sports Massage, Deep Tissue Massage, and Sports Rehabilitation practitioner with over 10 years of hands-on clinical experience. We now offer treatments at our dedicated physical location in Summertown as well as a mobile service—bringing expert care directly to you. Experiencing general aches and pains? Or are you on a journey of sports recovery and need expert support? BodyFix Therapy has you covered!"
Every massage therapist has said this to a client. I said it for years when I started out. It isn’t true.
There’s no toxin. Nobody has ever identified one, isolated it, or measured it going anywhere. The word just sounds convincing enough that it got repeated until it became something everyone knew.
The related one is lactic acid. The idea that it sits in your muscles causing soreness and a massage squeezes it out. Lactate clears from your bloodstream within about an hour of exercise finishing. It has long since gone by the time you’re sore, and it wasn’t causing the soreness anyway. That ache two days after a heavy session is a normal inflammatory response to small amounts of muscle damage, and it’s part of how you adapt.
So why do I still tell people to drink water afterwards?
Because staying hydrated is a good idea generally and it costs you nothing. Not because anything needs flushing.
I’d rather be straight with you about this stuff. Massage does plenty. It reduces pain, settles muscle tension, improves how you move and helps you feel better in your own body. That’s a decent list and it stands up on its own.
It just doesn’t need a story about toxins propping it up.
14/09/2026
Here is some insight into the core values of BodyFix therapy. If you need assistance, advice, or support regarding aches and pains that affect how you move and do the things you love, send me a DM to see if I can help.
10/09/2026
Asked this every autumn, so here’s my honest answer.
Usually no.
Complete rest feels like the safe option because it removes the thing that hurts. The problem is it also removes the thing that keeps you fit. Detraining starts within a couple of weeks, and arriving at a start line undertrained and underprepared carries its own risk. You’re then asking a body that’s done nothing for three weeks to do 13 or 26 miles in one go.
A taper is not rest. It’s a deliberate drop in volume while keeping some intensity, so you arrive fresh but still sharp.
For most niggles at this stage the answer is modify rather than stop. Less volume, different sessions, work into the area that needs it, and something to strengthen it. You keep the fitness with the aim to settle the problem down at the same time.
There are exceptions. Suspected bone stress injuries are the big one, and that’s a get it assessed properly situation rather than a push on and hope one.
If you’re weighing this up right now with a race in the diary, message me and tell me what’s going on. I’d rather tell you honestly whether you need to see me or not than have you sit on it for another fortnight.
If you’re deep in a training block, a session with me looks different to a general sports massage.
We start with the calendar. What race, what date, where you are in the plan, what this week and next week look like. That shapes everything, because treating someone five weeks out is a different job to treating someone with no deadline.
Then the assessment. What hurts, when it started, what it does during a run, what it does after. How you’re moving. What your training has actually looked like recently rather than what the plan said it would look like.
Then the hands on work, aimed at the areas that need it rather than a standard full leg routine.
Then the bit that matters most. What you do for the next fortnight. Which sessions to keep, which to shorten, what to add, what to leave alone. Two or three exercises maximum, because you’re already running five times a week and you’re not going to do eight.
You leave knowing exactly what you’re doing between now and race day.
07/09/2026
Every runner in a race block eventually asks the same question. Do I keep running on this or not.
Rough guide. For muscle and tendon pain, mild discomfort that stays mild, doesn’t build as you go, and has gone by the next morning is usually workable. Discomfort is not the same as damage, and being sensible around low levels of it is part of training rather than a sign something is wrong.
Three questions do most of the work. Does it get worse the further you go. Are you changing how you run to avoid it. Is it still there tomorrow. Yes to any of those means change something now rather than pushing on.
The exception is bone pain. Pinpoint pain in one specific spot, pain that sharpens as the run goes on, pain when you hop, pain at night. That one gets properly assessed before you run on it again. It’s the one thing in running you genuinely should not push through.
Peak weeks are where blocks fall apart. Highest mileage, worst sleep, life carrying on regardless.
The good news is that five weeks out you’ve got time. One week out you haven’t. Deal with it now.
03/09/2026
I read back through a chunk of my reviews this week and the same five things keep coming up.
Almost none of them are about technique.
They are about being listened to. Having things explained. Getting a message a week later asking how it is going. Pressure that was firm without being something to survive. Leaving with a short plan that actually fits around work.
That tells you something about what people are missing elsewhere. Most of them have been somewhere, been treated, and come away without ever really being asked what was going on.
The hands on work matters. I would not have a business without it. But it is maybe half of what helps someone.
I have got space in the diary this week. If something has been grumbling at you since the summer, message me INFO and I will get you booked in.
The hands-on work is only part of what actually helps someone.
The other part is at the start, where I ask questions and then shut up.
Most people arrive having had a very short conversation somewhere else. Seven minutes with a GP. A quick chat before someone got straight to work on them. Enough time to describe the symptom, nowhere near enough to describe the situation.
So they’ve never really said the whole thing out loud. What it stops them doing. What they’ve had to give up. What they’re quietly worried it means. How long they’ve been putting up with it before they finally booked something.
That stuff isn’t small talk. It changes what I do on the couch and what I send them home with.
It’s also the reason follow-up matters to me. A session is an hour. Whatever’s going on has usually been going on for months. One hour is a start, not an answer.
Ten years in and I’m more convinced of this than ever. The technique matters. But being properly listened to is doing more work than most people realise.
01/09/2026
Someone had a decent summer. Bit of time off, holiday, weeks where training was patchy or gone completely. Then September arrives, the kids go back, the routine returns, and they pick up exactly where they left off in July.
Same weights. Same mileage. Same number of sessions.
And two or three weeks later something starts complaining.
Here is the bit people miss. Your capacity to handle load is not fixed. It drops when you do less. That is not a flaw, it is just how the body works. Six weeks of doing less means your tissues can tolerate less than they could in June, even though you feel exactly the same.
So it is not that you did anything wrong. You just asked a September body to do a July workload.
The fix is boring and it works. Come back at roughly two thirds of where you left off and build from there over three or four weeks. Change one thing at a time. Judge it by how you feel the next day rather than during.
You will be back at your old numbers by October and you will get there without a six week detour through my treatment room.
Save this if you are restarting something this week.
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Really great experience. Sam took the time to listen properly to how the pain and tension in my shoulders had built up, explained what might be causing it, and gave me exercises that have genuinely helped. He also went through my gym routine with me and pointed out a few things that could be contributing.
The massage was easily the best I’ve ever had. I’d been in pretty bad pain for months, and afterwards it genuinely felt like a weight had been taken off my shoulders. I’ve been pain-free since. He’s a master of deep tissue work!
Sit down job and a sore back? Someone has probably told you it’s your posture.
Here’s the thing. The evidence doesn’t back that up.
Posture is not the villain it’s made out to be. There is no perfect posture to chase, and sitting up straight like a soldier isn’t going to save your spine.
What actually winds your back up is being stuck in one position for hours on end. Your body wants variety. It gets grumpy when you give it the same shape all day.
It’s also bigger than the chair you sit in. Your stress, your sleep, how much you move outside of work, it all feeds into how your back feels.
So stop obsessing over the perfect setup and try this instead.
Take more breaks.
Move often.
Get up and shake it out between tasks.
Look after your stress and your sleep.
Let go of the perfect posture idea for good.
Your back is strong and adaptable. It doesn’t need protecting from your desk chair. It needs you to move more.
Struggling with a desk bound back? Drop me a message and I’ll point you in the right direction.
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