Massage for improving results in sports

Athletes know well tight muscles, and know a massage can make them better. But the benefits of a massage for them are more than that: it allows a faster escalation in the effort scale, improving results, preventing injuries and speeding up of healing them. The massage works for the athlete both mechanically and physiologically, by stimulating clensing and reconstruction of body tissues. Some main points are:

• Increasing intramuscular pressure - allows a faster and more complete expelling of toxins and byproducts of exersized muscles. Good for athlets who increased traning fast. 
• Improving and maintaining flexibility - for example regions of the muscle that experience a repeated pulling, become stiff and create bulbous lumps ("trigger points"). These lumps are not as elastic as the original muscle tissue, and hurt when pressed directly. Massaging those triggers infuses more blood into them, softens them and returnes some of the lost flexibility. 
• Improves blood infusion to colagenic tissues - prevents ligaments and tendons inflammation. Speeds up the healing of pains caused by aggressive pulling. Good for bycicle riders, Tennis players and any Aerobics that includes repetative motions. 
• Separation of fashia stickings - enables a smoother motion of muscle, improves flexibility. good for weight lifters.
• Allows "Active rest" - keeps muscle active on rest days: nerve system is relaxed but the body is activated and does not regress. 
• Awareness to the body - early discovery of injuries and soreness. increases sensitivity to the general state of the body and allows improvement of technique and prevention of future injuries.  

When is it recommended to schedule a massage?

That greatly depends on the sport field, training routeen and goals. The general recommendation is about once a month or more, on a rest day, and of course whenever there's a specific need like a pulled muscle etc.