I had a diagnosis of tendonitis; but beyond sore tendons, I also had extremely cold fingers, numbness, tingling, etc. I found a book on trigger point therapy, "The trigger point therapy workbook - Your self-treatment guide to pain relief" by Clair Davies, which explained myofascial trigger points (basically, small parts of your muscles, called sarcomeres, get stuck contracted - it's what people usually call a "knot" in the muscle).
After a few hours working some of my muscles and finding a lot of trigger points, the numbness was basically gone, and my fingers weren't cold anymore, and I was in way less pain. Full healing of the tendonitis is being a slower process, but the targetted massage has helped it be much less unpleasant.
Trigger points cause a lot of pain, but the pain is usually in a remote part of the body from them (but which trigger points cause pain where is fairly consistant between people.) They can be identified in a few ways: if you're searching for them on yourself, they stand out because they hurt a lot when you touch them (sometimes, especially with the really bad ones, the place it refers pain to hurts more as well when you press on it.)
The book I mentioned is quite helpful, since it not only recommends some massage techniques (major points: be careful with your hands - use balls / tools / etc as much as possible instead, and use your knuckles or one hand pushing the fingertips of the other rather than kneeding, as it's much, much gentler on your hands), but is organized into chapters based on where you have pain, and talks about exactly which muscles to cause pain in those places, as well as showing where some of the more common trigger points in those muscles are (depending on the type of muscle fiber, they can be anywhere in the muscle, or much more likely to be in some characteristic places.)
It aims to be a more easily readible source of the information in an earlier book by doctors, "Myofascial Pain and disfunction: the trigger point manual", by Travell and Simons (which I haven't seen, unfortunately.)
Anyhow - I hope this helps. Feel free to ask me questions.
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