Common Pain Questions

Why do my knots keep coming back?

Because the knot is usually a symptom — not the cause. Until the thing creating it changes, it returns.

You get a massage, the tight spot in your shoulder finally lets go, you feel great for a day or two — and then it's right back, in the exact same place. It's one of the most frustrating patterns people bring to me, and it's also one of the most fixable, once you understand what a knot actually is and why it keeps reforming.

What a knot actually is

A "knot" — technically a trigger point — is a small band of muscle fibers stuck in a contracted state. They can't fully let go, so the spot stays tense, tender, and often refers pain elsewhere. It's not a tangle you can simply undo; it's a tiny patch of muscle that's lost the ability to relax on its own.

Pressing on it and releasing it in a session genuinely helps — but if the muscle keeps getting the same signal to contract, it'll reform. That signal is the part most people never address.

Why they keep returning

Knots reform when the underlying driver is still in place. Releasing the knot without changing the driver is like mopping the floor without turning off the leak. The usual culprits:

Posture and positioning — hours at a desk, a forward-head screen habit, or a bag always on the same shoulder keep loading the same muscles.
A muscle compensating for a weaker or inhibited one nearby, quietly overworking all day.
Stress, which keeps the nervous system in a low-grade braced state and muscles subtly clenched.
Old patterns — a past injury or habit the body has been guarding against long after it healed.

The knot is the body's response to one of these. Treat only the knot and it comes back; address the driver and it stops needing to.

Why the foam roller and tennis ball only go so far

Self-massage tools can give real, temporary relief — and they're worth using. But they have limits. It's hard to reach the deeper layers, hard to find the precise spot referring your pain, and nearly impossible to address a knot in a muscle you can't comfortably get an angle on. They also don't tell you which muscle is the actual source versus which is just along for the ride.

What helps short-term

Foam rolling, a tennis or lacrosse ball, heat, and gentle movement all calm a flared-up spot and buy relief. Good for maintenance between sessions.

What changes the pattern

Finding the true source, releasing it precisely, and identifying the posture, habit, or compensation feeding it — so the muscle stops being asked to knot up.

How I work with recurring knots

My approach is to treat the knot you feel and hunt for what's creating it. Trigger point therapy releases the contracted fibers directly, but I'm also paying attention to the muscles around it — which ones are overworking, which are weak, what posture or movement pattern keeps reloading the spot. Often the knot you feel in one place is being driven by tension somewhere you'd never suspect.

From there it's usually a few sessions plus a couple of small things you can change day to day — how you sit, what you stretch or strengthen, how you carry tension. That combination is what finally breaks the cycle, instead of just resetting it for a few days.

Let's break the cycle

If the same knots keep coming back no matter what you try, the answer is usually upstream of the knot itself. Let's find what's driving it — and actually resolve it.

Book a Session