Tag Archives: massage jobs

A Massage Therapist’s Top Ten

Debates roar among massage therapists about which are the best oils, the best draping, and the most effective techniques. Yet never have so many argued so passionately about this question: whether to start clients in the supine or prone position. O the polarity!

So many have crusaded with passionate arguments about breath patterns, face-cradle wrinkles, sinuses, etc. But we all know the real reasons to start up or down is exigency.

Let’s hope the clients never find out.

Sue’s Top Ten Reasons to Start Massage Clients Facedown:

(Guaranteed to be from actual experiences in the Wild Wacky World of Hurry Up and Relax!)

10. My neighbor upstairs likes to stomp on the way to and from her hourly cigarette break.

9. Whatever you had for lunch, I’m investing in a dab of peppermint under the face cradle.

8. Your assistant called ahead and asked me to put you in a coma.

7. I am hoping you won’t notice the sudden appearance of wet stains on the ceiling.

6. Your spouse made this appointment and asked me to keep you here for at least two hours so she can get in a nap.

5. We can’t get the flashing-light fire alarm to stay off. Perhaps it has to do with someone’s bright idea to dry body brushes in the microwave.

4. The rips in the sheets might not be as noticeable.

3. I don’t want to listen to the rest of your multi-level-marketing pitch.

2. I went to lunch at the taco joint – beans!

1. Is that a hernia?

Of course, there is always the competing Number One Reason to Start Massaging Clients Face-Up: I can’t find the face cradle.

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Massage with Attention and Distraction

Massage therapists know that many clients need to be listened to – really listened to – when they come in for therapy. But during the session there is something else that clients crave – the ability to be distracted away from their focus and relax.

I often use distraction in massage sessions, oddly enough in an attempt to help the client create mindfulness. A paradox? Yes, but it works.

In the anatomical sense, distraction means pulling one bone away from another to reduce contact – without injury to the joint.

In the massage practice sense, sometimes people are getting a massage to stop running ideas through their minds – to stop ruminating on a problem, pain or injury.

This is where as therapists, we can help clients by allowing them some time to put aside their problem or problems. It gives clients some time to divert attention, for example, by focusing on diaphragm breath, or feeling their shoulder as part of their bodies instead of a source of pain.

Surely the switch between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is in the driver’s seat during this process, but the touch of hands consoles and fosters the release of vigilance.

Giving the brain up to its basic self – respiration, registering the feel of nerves, bones and muscles, these are gifts for clients who have much stress. My biggest compliment can be a sleeping client at the end of a session.

A wise massage therapist can say: Sometimes the act of forgetting can be just as important as remembering.

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Finding Your Best Massage Venue

A massage therapist starting to practice has quite a few challenges, not the least of which is finding the right place to practice.

Options are multiple: gyms, tennis clubs, spas, medical offices, chiropractic, acupuncture or p.t. clinics, clients’ homes, business conference rooms, hotels, chains, etc. Each has its advantages and drawbacks.

Sometimes the best option for newbie massage persons is to try as many locations as possible to determine where they would like to practice.

The important factor in these experiences is to truly work in each venue – give it your all to see if the dynamics of a happy practice are there.

When I speak with others about their sense of success or commitment to massage as a career, opinions often track back to their personal investment in making a venue work.

The conflicts often come in when the venue requires a therapist to work out of their personal comfort zone. When I hear statements like “I didn’t get into massage to become a salesperson.” Or “I don’t think telling someone to come in once a week is ethical.”

These statements are comforting to some because they allow therapists reasons to not expand their skills. Choices like this should point therapists to seek a different venue.

I encourage therapists to put their objections aside just in case they are missing an opportunity – maybe the venue would work for them if they were more adaptable or had other skills in the mix.

Ultimately the choices we make, much in life and in work, are based on what we are willing to try and how hard we are willing to work.

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Providing Post-Surgery massage to clients

Clients seek massage therapy for many reasons, and one of the most challenging for a therapist is chronic pain following surgery.

It’s a tough spot – here we are dealing with tissues that have had a direct surgical intervention – moved, touched, cut or compressed. We also are dealing with structures altered when the body’s healing response forms scar tissue and adhesions.

Massage therapy, thankfully, is low-tech when it comes to post-surgery pain. When I first began treating clients for this type of problem, I referred to muscular patterns of pain and overlapped them with “dermatome” patterns – meaning areas where disturbed nerves can cause pain.

Often stabbing or sharp pains can come from nerves that have developed adhesions or stress patterns from scar tissue pulling on them. These changes may occur far above the area where pain is felt. The massage is always gentle and soothing, following the course of nerves through plexuses and their redundant branches.

Another technique is pain mapping – each time the client returns we again map the pain areas to see if they have changed. If has altered or lessened the pain then the areas treated may be part of the disturbance.

Abdominal breathing is also an important part of these recovery massages. The diaphragm is inhibited by pain and restoring its function – awakening the “bellows” of the body allows for gentle stretching of muscles, organs and nerves. Ultimately diaphragm breathing is the gentlest massage of all.

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Helping your clients set goals for their massage sessions

I always like to check in with new clients on their goals for massage. Do they want to improve sleep, performance, reduce aches, release stress, etc.

I like to give people a few choices on my intake, plus the opportunity to mark “all of the above.” Lots of “aota’s” later, I have come to see what it truly means to some clients. One such new client put it so well:

“I would like to do what I want to do, when I want to do it.”

His statement made us both laugh, because it often sums up what we all want in life: freedom. We want freedom to enjoy activities without thinking about consequences.

I have to admit that massage cannot deliver that goal.

“When I get to that place myself, I’ll let you know,” I said.

Meanwhile, it made me think about what am I really selling as a massage therapist. When I find, treat and track dysfunction I am perhaps vending exactly the opposite: Allowing people the opportunity to choose after careful consideration of their abilities and consequences.

We all have choices, and we make them sometimes a bit too quickly. Choosing to stay at a job that is no longer fair or fun is a choice: people make those decisions for other kinds of rewards. When they come in for massages, I try to help them survive and feel better about that choice.

Massage can’t fix a lot but it can set the mood for people to adapt and make better choices when it comes to stretching, exercise, foods or sleep.

If I think back to my sandbox days, it was all about trying to have things my way – and I was guided to make a better choice for myself and for the future. Human nature, in deed.

Perhaps I would suggest this goal instead:

I would like to be able to do what is good for me, I would like to enjoy doing good for me, and I would like to do it when it is best for me to do it.

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Starting Choices, Massage Therapists

As they graduate from education programs, massage therapists have many choices for employment. Yet finding that perfect job can be elusive.

The venues have expanded in the past few years but the economics remain the same: work a lot for less pay, work a lot less for more pay.

For recent graduates looking to pay their bills – and their student loans – the pressure is quite high. How do newbies balance reliable income with recognition of their skills? start

As an experienced massage therapist, I don’t have all the answers. But let me suggest some strategies that can help graduates maneuver through the first years of their massage careers.

Use your Advantages – Most massage therapists are women, and often female therapists who are attractive can build a book of clients more quickly. So put that picture on your resume, business card, website, whatever, and prepare to get busy.

Better yet, Use Your Disadvantages – Male, muscular and big? Men who do massage face discrimination from clients both male and female. The reasons, trust me, are very unfair. But why not make it an advantage? A male can be a strong, resilient chair massage therapist. Chair massages are done fully dressed, often in public places such as conventions. That eliminates a lot of objections clients have to male therapists. Those practices bloom.

Gender politics can be an advantage in other situations. I also know a female therapist who looks and acts non-feminine. Is that a problem? Heck, no, she told me. “No trophy wife ever has to worry about me making a play for her husband.”

Have more than one source of income – My friend’s career strategy was simple – her income was secondary to the family breadwinner. Her husband handled the bills and worked the long hours of a tax accountant. That left her time to groom and select her clientele without a lot of money pressure. She also had time to volunteer and market herself. She worked at high-end spas and targeted her favored client type – professional athletes. It took years to build a clientele, but she got there. She has a great elevator speech, and the more she practiced it, the more it became her practice.

Do more than massage alone – Another of my friends runs her own day spa and has a cosmetology license. along with a massage license. She can wax; do facials and other cosmetic treatments to fill her book. A slow massage day can be a busy wax day, etc. She didn’t like cutting and coloring hair, but she loves doing facials, massage and waxing.

Some therapists can increase incomes by doing administrative and billing work at their chiropractor’s offices. Another friend also works as a personal assistant, running errands for people who are too busy or too old to do errands.

Work in Multiple Massage Venues – A doctor, a chiropractor, a spa, a chain, a physical therapy clinic, a hotel, a mall chair-massage store. You may surprise yourself to discover your best fit. And if one venue becomes slow, another may be busy.

Be Productive No Matter Where You Work – I call this the “Joseph” strategy. Like Joseph in the Bible, maybe your brothers don’t like you and you get sold into slavery but you work hard and do so well you end up running your master’s house and businesses.

Where you start does not have to be where you end up. Use your venue as a learning laboratory. Does your chain want you to sign up members? Practice so you can figure out how to do that. Sell products? You can learn how to do that, too. What about upgrades? Some of the more corporate places have quotas for therapists. Instead of stressing about meeting those quotas, can you figure out how to fill them? boybaseball

I met sales quotas at a spa by asking someone who could sell how to do it. I sucked at it, but kept practicing and asking questions until I go it. You can also read up on sales techniques, and you can observe those who are successful at it. The key is practice. Being a productive massage employee is all about trying multiple times. Kind of like baseball, hitting three out of 10 times makes you a superstar.

Tips for Bringing Muscles Back to Life

As mysterious as the workings of the human body is, we massage therapists have learned a few tricks to bring errant, dysfunctional muscles back to working order.

I continue to be impressed by the methods of active release, also known as myofascial release, in reviving elements of structure and function to certain muscles.

I recently had the fun of trying to extricate a “burning” sensation in the left lumbar area over the area we associate with discs L-5 and S-1. This is a frequent complaint of people coming in for massage, and sometimes restoring circulation and tone don’t quite fix this problem.

Active release involves allowing the therapist to palpate the errant muscle and drawing it through a complete range of motion. What people sometimes forget in this venue is that complete range of motion must be done by the client, not the therapist, to truly meet the definition of active release.

This took a good trusting relationship between me, the therapist, and my client. It helped that it was not the first time I have seen this client. It also helped that the client was suffering enough to be gung-ho about trying the step.

First, I demonstrated the full motion range to the client, then I asked the client to go through the motion with my verbal prompts. The actions of the suspected muscle, the multifidus, are varied between spinal stabilization in standing and bending, especially while holding a weight in front of the spine. I usually re-discover the aaaargh-factor of the multifidus muscle when I am trying to lift boxes onto a shelf in the garage. Or take them out.

Clients will come in and report such activity as garage-cleaning, house-cleaning, tub-cleaning, etc., followed by pain in the area later in the evening. If it has been a bad lift, the pain is immediate.

Once in a while a client will report trauma, such as falling off a ladder, or a fall during gymnastics, that will make me believe the mutlifidus is now stabilizing a spinous process or transverse process fracture. Off to the doctor they go. I can do active release for the multifidus after the fracture has healed.

This client was sitting on the massage table, back to me, while I palpated the area of the multifidus, just lateral to the spine and about a half-inch into the myofascial bundle. I kept constant pressure on the multifidus as the client bent forward, bent back and then rotated to the opposite side and bent forward. When the multifidus is particularly out of sync, I may do this with the client on their side and asking them to arch the back in this wobble-toy motion.

Give this technique a try with your massage-trading partner to see how it works for you. It’s another trick to hang onto when the clients present with a big pain in a very small area. Do you have your own version of this technique? I would love to hear some more….

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Smart Companions

Numb fingertips, cramp-y necks and para-spinals that feel like abandoned rock quarries. We massage therapists treat the injuries that computer technology can produce.

My smart phone just updated itself (can it reproduce?) revealing the phrase “Lifetime Companion” on the home screen. Really? This whole phone thing has gotten out of hand.

People are ruining their eyesight, developing dowager humps and filling up my schedule book from peering at tiny screens. Weren’t these things supposed to help us?

Device injuries have delightful names such as Pac Man Pinky, Smart Phone Presbyopia, and Blackberry Thumb. Let’s hear it for the names. But when are we going to get devices that do not turn us into garden gnomes?

I have been waiting…tap…tap…tap. Captain Kirk just had to ask the computer to do stuff, he dictated his log, and sometimes he would twist a little button on his communicator. The only repetitive motion he suffered was trying to do that funny split-finger salute when Spock introduced him to the fam.

The techies have been awaiting the Apple I Watch, a device that looks like we will all be hunching over something even smaller in the coming months.

We massage therapists can hear a “Ca-Ching!” in our futures. The devices are not getting better. They are getting us more work than we can handle. So much for getting to that seminar in Costa Rica this year….

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Stress Experts Love Massage

At this time in my massage therapy career, I think I have got the whole stress thing down.

Then something pops up that tells me: HA! Yes, HA! A very karmic and cosmic and pulse-wave HA!

My family and i have been living in a hotel for nearly a month following flooding at my home. A simple toilet clog and my house was drenched with watery pooh. Men in white mooon suits put big hair dryers in every room, and me, the dog and my 90-year-old mother-in-law were off to the land of free hot breakfasts. Oh, did I mention that hunnybuns went to the emergency room? In all the rush for towels, my dear one fell and snapped a thumb ligament.

All together, we are very lucky. Lucky insurance is covering almost everything, lucky the damage was mostly to floors and drywall, lucky hunnybun’s injury was not worse. We are sleeping in nice beds. I don’t have to wash my massage sheets by banging them on a wet rock. During this I have found the stress meter running into the red zone. Yes, that stress meter, the scale I thought I had zenned my way through emerging on the other side a massage therapist for all seasons. I have managed to get to the office and clear my head before sessions, but with a new respect for abrupt chaotic change.

One of my regular clients is also a stress expert. A tax-time CPA and stock market man. He knows what it is like to let the car inch along a half-mile line for the late-open post office on April 15. Those fun moments in the life of a tax guy have diminished now that one can file electronically, but the neck knots are souvenirs. I had to call him to change his appointment time. (Did you know that all the flooring stores close Nt 5? And cabinet stores are all closed on Mondays? I found out.)

We gotta get you out of the hotel, he said. Thanks for understanding and letting me change your appointment, I said. No problem, he said. Trust me I know how bad stress can get. I used to have a small office at the house. I didn’t use it much but occassionaly especially at tax time. I was working 18-hour days one year because I took on too much. I was at the house and getting ready to go to the office when I could not find my wallet. I looked everywhere. It took hours and I went through everything, the car, the house, the office, and no wallet. Finally I had to cancel all my cards and make an appointment for a new ID. I was so upset.

Next day I go into the home office right after my wife was in there getting something and I see the wallet sitting there right in the middle of the desk. I’m like, you just put the wallet there, right? She says no, and I can’t believe it. I’m like you are playing a joke, right? And she starts to get mad at me and says she didn’t go near the desk. The wallet must have been sitting there in plain sight the whole time I was looking for it and I couldn’t see it.

Well, I got stressed out too, I said. This week I convinced a cabinet guy to open the door of his closed shop so I could pick out a vanity. I took hunnybuns for outpatient surgery and played nurse. Do you know you cannot tie shoes with one hand? Or open jars, shower, or fold laundry, or get the leash on the dog?

The kicker is I went over to the house to get the mail after work one evening. I spent 30 minutes trying to squeeze through stacked furniture to get to the mailbox key hung in the kitchen until I gave up and went back to the hotel. Frustration!

Next day we’re having coffee and hunnybuns looks at my car keys and holds them up. What are these?

When we left from the flood I must have put the mailbox keys on my car key chain and forgot. I am so use to having everything in its place i didn’t even check my car keys. Hiding in plain sight!

Stress really can do bad things to your brain….HA!

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Massage Finger Maps Helps Reduce Numbness

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 pinched or altered by time or trauma.

Recently a client sought help for numbness in the fingertips of the thumb, index and middle finger. Massage therapists are aware that numbness or weakness calls for evaluation by a doctor. This client had already seen her doctor, and an evaluation had shown disc problems in the neck.

My client was hoping for some improvement brought about by massage instead of more drastic measures.

A quick frisk of Google for numbness in these areas yields lots of articles regards dermatomes and myotomes, showing the body sliced into grids labeled with the common nerve root/disc source. The thumb, index and middle fingers are associated with the medial and radial nerves, and with C5-C6. Tingles in these areas might be caused anywhere from the spine and disc to the carpal tunnel.

By tracking the radial nerve from neck to fingers, I used several techniques to warm, stretch and free the nerve from adhesions. I also massaged the scalenes and applied light traction to the head, in hopes of opening the pinched off areas.

Her symptoms were greatly reduced, and my client is hopeful that massages and some physical therapy will keep her out of the operating room. Will my client have neck surgery? I don’t know, but her symptoms took a turn for the better, and that is what clients seek.

If dermatomes and myotomes are new to you, try a Google of them for some great information that will help your massage practice. I also keep a printed chart handy in my massage appointment book.

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