Shoulder massages, or a knot in the shoulder muscle?

Why are shoulder massages so painful? My masseuse says it’s because the muscles get knotted up owing to the hours we spend at work hunched up in front of computers and at desks. This seems odd to me. A knot? In a muscle? How does a muscle get knotted? And why should sitting in a fixed posture cause muscle pain only in the shoulders?

Somewhat corroborative of what she says, when she runs her thumb slightly below and behind the line of my shoulder, it does seem to encounter some sort of protuberance that moves with the muscle. The sucker hurts somewhat while she’s working on it but she makes sure never to use pressure that would put me in agony or leave residual pain. At first I thought it was some sort of growth that I should get a doctor to look at, but she assures me that all her office-worker clients have it too.

What’s the deal here?

They’re not really “knots” in the usual sense of the word, it’s just the name given to a particular condition. The technical term for them is trigger points. The article I linked has some more information.

Thank you, jovan. That article was very informative. Admittedly, quite a lot of it was Greek to me, but I at least have a basic sense of why the knots happen and how they can be treated.

Ignorance fought!