Trigger Point Pain Finder

Trigger point pain is the scourge of humanity. Trigger points cause or contribute to 80% of chronic pain according to leading experts in the field. They can cause pain so severe that you feel like you have herniated a disc. Or they can sit there quietly and wait for you to move wrong or sit too long and then they start talking to you (or yelling at you) through the language of pain. Almost everyone has them, though they are not always active.

Trigger points are knots in your muscles that create stiffness in the muscle and pain in the body, sometime over the trigger point, but more often in other areas, which causes great confusion. Complete discussion visit my Myofascial Trigger Point Page.

What do you do about trigger point pain?

Fortunately, self massage is relatively simple. You can read about it on my Self Massage page. The tricky part is finding them. I have recently found an invaluable interactive trigger point pain finder below.

With this tool, you can mouse over the area that you are having trouble with, and it lights up. Click on it and it shows a list of muscles that can cause pain in that area. When you click on the name of a muscle, it will show you where the muscle is on the body with its trigger points. When you mouse over the trigger point, it lights up the pain pattern for that trigger point. The rest of the muscles are listed in the right corner, so you can click through all of them and find which muscle might be causing your pain.

Important information to note about this process:

• When you find the trigger point and push on it, an active trigger point will frequently, though not always, send out a radiating pain to the referral areas.
• The pain pattern is an illustration of the most common areas that the trigger point refers to. You may have part or all of the pain pattern, or you may even have some pain in an area not pictured (since these areas are less common).  
• Frequently, multiple trigger points will refer to the same area to create the pain, so find all your trigger points that are contributing to the pain.
• A trigger point feels like a thickening in the middle of a tight band of muscle, so as you stroke over the muscle in question, you will feel a band like a guitar string and in that band a tender point. That is your trigger point.
• Sometime trigger points are so big, they can feel like a golf ball. This is especially true in the low back.

Trigger point pain treatment

As I mentioned above, probably the easiest method is self massage which you can learn about here.

There are a number of other treatments available, like laser for trigger points which is painless and effective, and now available for home use.

There are other methods listed on this page.

And you may want a tool to be able to reach those hard-to-reach muscles that may be causing you trouble. Check out the tools here.

Return from Trigger Point Pain Finder to Home