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 trigger points at home – now his aches and pains were so bad he couldn’t sleep.
The points had been overworked to the point that his body was now so tight and armored this was going to be a tough massage.
With his knee bent, I tried to distract the femur from the hip capsule. Nothing doing. The psoas was so tight it wouldn’t move.
I took a teaching moment. “You go through this at massage school,” I said. “You discover trigger points, see them as the answer to all ills, and you come into class one day having set them all afire with your own merciless fingers. You learn the hard way.”
I took another moment to demonstrate a trigger point release on his common extensor. “Really?” he said. “Is that all the pressure you use?”
Uh-huh.
It took a while, but I was able to get some of the psoas unlocked. I see a lot of Swedish in his future.
With some massage therapy clients, assigning a little homework on their own trigger points may be a good thing. But (oh no please!) don’t try this at home without some instruction.
If home trigger point therapy seems like a good idea, I like to tell clients: “You will be very tempted to be much meaner to your trigger points than I am.”
