Smart phones have created an endless employment opportunity for massage therapists – we can relieve the head and neck aches they foster and show clients how to reduce their sting. At best the glare-y screens will make a users neck stiff and tight to flexion on the side holding the phone. So many people peer … Continue reading Smart Phones and the Rectus Gang
Massage therapists will often have clients ask about foot or finger pain, or a strip of tightness around the knees or hips, but when is this a symptom of something gone wrong? As we rub away with our talented hands, we may have an opportunity to assess if a nerve root or disc has been … Continue reading Massage Finger Maps Helps Reduce Numbness
In the early days of a massage therapist’s career, discovering which techniques work well in a treatment session can be baffling. Is it deep tissue? Soothing strokes? Is it short sessions? Long sessions? Is it movement? Breath? Is it the clients’ mindset? Perceived value? Desire? Somehow fumbling about in our dim-lit treatment rooms we establish … Continue reading Knowing Your Client – What Works For One Person Doesn’t Work For All
My education in massage did not stop with graduation from a massage school. If anything, it intensified. Now a practicing therapist, I was learning every day from the most prolific of authors, the best logisticians, the brightest of the best. It has been hard to keep up sometimes, but very rewarding. The classroom has been … Continue reading A Degree from Massage University
My massage therapy client has been working very hard to lose weight. She is going to the gym four times a week, training under the watch of two very good kiniesiology trainers, and eating a diabetic diet. She has lost more than 70 pounds in the past year. That is a little fast to lose … Continue reading Providing Quadriceps Massage
Massage therapists know that when a client has been pulling something – wire or cable, storage boxes, dogs, etc. that they will find a host of sore and overstretched muscles. Ergonomically, it is not good to pull, but to push. Push we can do much more easily and with much less fatigue. Somehow the design … Continue reading The Push
Massage therapists have their favorite spots to approach changing patterns of movement and improving function. Over the years, I have asked the question often: Muscles or tendons? My early experience dictated muscles. There we find bunched-up, dysfunctional fibers and endplates. Trigger point theory called for a full cleansing of these scatterbrains, along with their associates … Continue reading Muscles or Tendons?
One of my most fun massage therapy clients likes to update me on his activities and the connection between what he has been doing and what is going on in his neck, back, hands, etc. I don’t get a laundry list of precarious Christmas lights installations or kneecaps wondering off by themselves on Audubon bird-sighting … Continue reading Zombies vs. Massage Therapists
The nice man who likes to run every day came into my massage therapy office looking for some relief. I thought I was going to do a massage – but it turned out to be an intervention. This man had gotten a hold of a trigger point therapy workbook. He had been doing his own … Continue reading They are Called Trigger Points for a Reason…
So many people work on computers and in hunched positions that massage therapists are seeing more clients for acid reflux and heartburn problems. Recently I doctors have referred clients for massage to relieve reflux, and the results seem good. I wanted to offer some treatment tips. First, reflux symptoms – burning in the throat, burping … Continue reading Massage Relief for Reflux and Indigestion