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 and satellites. Follow with a stretch, and the trigger points are gone from the muscles.
Unless they come back.
More recent experience leans toward the tendons. If the tension returns to the muscle, it must be from a higher direction. First up, the tendons. Treat tendons and the muscles will unfurl like the Stars & Stripes on the Fourth of July.
Illustrious massage leader Ida Rolf squares off against tendons more often than muscle bellies. Her first run tends to be the big guys: TFLs, ITBs, ligamentum nuchaes, thoracolumbar aponeuroses and raffe. Stretch and function returns.
Sometimes after a full run at tendons I have pulled back and checked muscles. Are they clear? Have they found their function again? Will it last?
I try not to doubt my work, but there are those folks who have chronic patterns. Sometimes they seem to have more than enough fuel from stress at work and home for muscle/tendon function to recur. Yet I wonder, is it the structure touched or the touch itself? And is it perhaps different based on the massage therapist’s own personal tuner?
Perhaps the site of intervention is like a menu. You pick what you like. Hmmm. That might explain why I often begin a session with a bright: “Happy to see you today!”
