10 reasons why you should get a massage after working all day in the office:
- De-stress after a rough day.
- Get the kinks and muscle tension worked out of your neck, shoulders and back.
- Make the workday go faster in anticipation.
- A chance to feel your body as a body, not as a machine that pushes paper, answers the phone, or enters data.
- Give your eyes some time to relax before staring at a computer or television screen all night.
- Nothing on TV at that time, anyway.
- Best thing you can do for yourself on a monthly basis.
- An hour to get excited for dinner.
- An hour-long nap before dinner.
- Some time to think about no one but yourself.
Blog posts might be a little slow for the next couple months. I started taking a Spanish class, and that's taking up a good bit of free time. Don't worry, though - I'll continue writing (and hopefully posting occasionally) and should be back to my weekly posts by the end of the year!
Researchers Find That Massage Has Physiological Effects
Details:
53 adults, half of whom received a 45 minute Swedish massage, the other half received a 45 minute light touch session. The subjects who received the Swedish massage showed a significant decrease in cortisol (stress hormone) and arginine vasopressin (hormone linked to aggressive behavior), and showed a significant increase in lymphocytes (white blood cells - immunity).
All that to say: massage is good for you, and now there's some scientific proof.
I get asked pretty often if a trigger point is the same as a muscle knot. People have heard of knots. They know what a knot feels like. Trigger points are a more foreign concept; you typically wouldn't run into one unless looking for it. The pain patterns associated with trigger points aren't very intuitive - unlike a knot, trigger point might not be located in the same spot as the pain.
To help understand the differences between these concepts, I drew some pictures. For the record, these illustrations are in no way accurate representations of muscles, knots or trigger points... or pain (red area):
A Knot
A Trigger Point
Things to note:
- Knots are bigger, often visible. Trigger points are much smaller and can usually only be detected by palpation.
- Knots hurt on the knot, with minimal spillover onto the rest of the muscle. Trigger points hurt at the source as well, but they often refer pain to remote areas.
It's a common story:
A client comes in for a session and says he wants me to work on his neck and shoulders. That's where the pain is, he tells me. I begin the massage by focusing on these areas, warming up and loosening the muscles. But when the client flips onto his stomach, I take note of his mid and low back. Just the look of these areas tells me that his muscles are tight. I touch them briefly - yep, they definitely need to be massaged.
I have a quick moment of self-doubt: My client didn't mention his back at all - maybe it doesn't hurt? He seemed very sure of where his problem areas were; should I really second-guess his claims? But my instinct wins out and I spend a fair amount of time massaging his back.
And it pays off. After the session my client says, "Wow, I had no idea my back was so tight until you started massaging it."
Or replace "back" with arms, neck, legs, gluts, anything. This interaction happens all the time. But why does it happen so much? Do people really not know where they hurt?
The short answer is yes. The body (rather, the brain) is great at habituating to pain or ignoring it altogether. This is a great skill - for survival. Severe, constant pain can be crippling, there's no denying that. For some, being able to focus their attention away from the pain might be the only way to get through the day.
But on the flip side of the coin, not paying attention to what's going on in your body lessens your awareness. If you don't notice that your leg hurts after you bump into a table, you won't think to put ice on it. If you don't realize that you hunch your shoulders in stressful situations, you won't bother trying to loosen them up.
Your body awareness also accounts for a big part of your body image, or how you see yourself. If you aren't aware of your body's shape, or its aches and movements, there's no way for you to feel truly connected to it. Lacking a firm grasp of what your body looks like and feels like is thought to be one of the underlying factors in eating disorders.
To bring this whole concept back to massage: Touch is hugely important in developing a positive self-image and maintaining body awareness. In both massage research and developmental psychology research, this fact holds true (the article linked above cites a number of studies).
In the end, finding a comfortable attitude towards your body means being neither hyperaware of every discomfort nor completely oblivious to the most basic things. Sure, sometimes your tension will take you by surprise, but knowing your body well enough to know when it needs help - a massage, a doctor, a nap - means that you're taking active steps towards a healthier life.
Belmont Street Fair is this Sunday! The "core" of the fair (the part that's closed to vehicle traffic) is from SE 34th to 37th, but there will be live music, food, and special events all along Belmont from 20th to 58th. Free shuttles are there to take you up and down the street.
I'll be giving free chair massages up at the Good Food Here pod (12+ delicious food carts) at 43rd. It'll be a great spot for lunch - get a massage while you wait for your food, listen to live music while you eat.
And if you mention this post when you stop by my massage station, I'll give you a coupon for a discounted massage. Hope to see you there!
People ask me all the time what kind of massage I do. It's a deceptively simple question - naming off a few massage styles might suffice, but I feel that such a basic answer wouldn't actually explain much.
I'm trained in certain styles, and I'm knowledgeable enough about others to utilize them regularly. But then there are some that I know next to nothing about in the way of specifics; just the underlying concept is enough to influence my technique. Each different style blends into the other and it's impossible to tease out any one of them without destroying the subtlety.
But more to the point: the layperson, the typical massage client, doesn't care about individual modalities. They don't care if you use myofascial release, Reiki or craniosacral massage; they just want to know if you can get the job done.
You can say, I am a deep tissue massage therapist. But that can't be all you do. I had a client who initially wanted (and needed) for me to use my elbows, dig as hard as I could into his back and shoulders. After a few sessions, though, we had to step back and take a new approach: his muscles were looser and could no longer tolerate (and would no longer benefit from) the pressure I had been using previously. I needed to adjust my massage technique to meet new demands.
How best to explain it? I think Bruce Lee does a pretty good job to illustrate the philosophy in this 1971 interview:
[Can't embed the interview, but click to watch the pertinent clip]
"you see, actually I do not teach Karate, because I do not believe in styles anymore... I do not believe there is such thing as like Chinese way of fighting or Japanese way of fighting, or whatever way of fighting because... unless a human being has 3 arms and 4 legs, we will have a different form of fighting... so styles tend to not only separate man because they have their own doctrines, and the doctrines became the gospel truth, that you cannot change, you know? but if you do not have style, if you just say here I am, as a human being, how can I express myself? totally and completely... That way, you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization, as opposed to a process of continuing growth..." [emphasis mine]
Sure, Bruce Lee is talking about martial arts, but the concept holds true for massage as well. The most important thing is the ability to flow seamlessly between one style and another, to incorporate techniques from a variety of sources and create a unique, personal massage style.
Technically speaking, this type of massage is known as "integrative massage". But calling it that gives the image of an established style you can find in a textbook. In fact, no two "integrated" massages are the same. Each therapist brings a different background of knowledge and experience to the massage. Likewise, every client (and even the same client over multiple sessions) brings different needs and goals to the session. The best massage style needs to reflect this continual changing and shifting of skills and priorities.
And with that in mind, I'll leave you with another Bruce Lee quote:
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash! Be water, my friend.
Massage as water. Something to meditate on, no?
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