It's actually very common to be sore the day after a massage, especially if you had deep tissue, a lot of stretching, or trigger point work. And if you don't drink a lot of water the day of and the day after the massage, you are much more likely to experience soreness. There is generally a pattern to after-massage soreness: the day of the massage, you feel great, loose and relaxed and not at all sore. 1-2 days after, you wake up extremely sore, sometimes with flu-like achy joints on top of muscle soreness. This generally lasts 1 day, although it may occasionally stretch to 2. The NEXT day, day 3/4, you once again feel great.
My experience has been that extremely tight muscles or muscles that have been tight for an extended period of time tend to be sore the day after they relax, even if they are worked on relatively gently. There are several theories on why this occurs, but not, to my knowledge, any hard data on the phenomenon. The dominant theory is that this is due to toxins built up in the muscle.
Here's the explanation: When muscles are tight, they have decreased blood flow to them. The tighter the muscle, the less blood flow. With normal blood flow, the body clears away any toxins that are released as a result of muscle activity, but when the muscle gets tight and blood flow is reduced, the body cannot carry away all the toxins and some of them are left in the muscle. They continue to build up as long as the muscle remains tight.
When you get a massage, the muscle relaxes and blood flow normalizes. Blood rushes into the blood-starved tissue, the accumulated toxins are released into the system as a whole, and the circulatory system begins to clear them away. This leads to a temporary overload of toxins in the system, which cause soreness and sometimes even flu-like symptoms. This is why it's important to drink a LOT of water the day of and day after a massage; if you don't take in enough fluids, the body has a more difficult time with toxin removal and you feel crappier for longer. It's also important to get up and move around, to keep circulation good and stimulate the lymphatic system.
So. Next-day soreness is both common and normal. The remedy is to drink lots of water and to get up and move around even though you're sore. However, if you are sore for more than 2 days, or if you actually have a bruise, then you need to sit down with your massage therapist and discuss their use of pressure.
