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 of things and the human body makes push much better than pull.
This concept gets forgotten, here and there, by otherwise wise, experienced and intuitive massage therapists, in this case me.
Oh my, something was up. I went for my weekly massage, which I hadn’t had for three weeks because my schedule got crazy, and felt what seemed like a loop of fatigued tissue running from my traps to posterior rotators to lats to triceps to forearms to my thumbs.
Funny I didn’t know that bad patch was there until the massage therapist starting rubbing there. How many times has a client told me that they had no idea something hurt until it was touched? It was especially bad on my left side. Lo, I am left-handed.
As my friend and massage therapist trade-partner tried to get the angst out of this area, I suddenly became aware that I had been doing something wrong. Oh so very wrong. Me? In the biz now for 20 years and I have found a new way to feel yucky?
Hey, it happens.
After three massages that week, I began to feel a lot better. The drilled-in fatigue dropped, I felt less looped in the shoulders and back.
But I needed to find out for myself what I had been doing that had run me off the boards.
I was working with a client who had a habit of clutching items – files, purses, children, and etc. when the dawn finally broke over Marblehead.
I had been working on rotator cuffs from the opposite side of the client, pulling up and back on trigger points in the lats / tereses / infraspinatus muscles. One can massage from the opposite side, on occasion, of course without ending up sore. But one must use the weight of the body, mainly one’s assets, to create the pull. Somehow in the frenzy of the past month I had forgotten this and started using my pulling muscles instead of leverage. What are the pulling muscles? Traps, lats, triceps, etc. Somehow I had forgotten to bend my knees and use weight instead of muscle.
Oh, I have been very good this week. Now I work trapped shoulder blades from the same side. I take care to move the arm into flexion to expose the shoulder. And I vow to never, ever, to pull again. Time for another Epsom soak.
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I am so excited to hear your failure to success story. Now you move into an educated thought pattern by touch!!! The more wisdom you get is by the times you keep trying to find out by reading the tissues. Those less wisdom have not began the journey. Knowing what it feels like on the inside helps you to help others by figuring out how you were helped and help them to help you then help you to help you! My new “F” is F A S C I A!!
All good points and observatio on how to work diifferently and be ware to save your body and use weight if needed, but beware on a solemn vow against pulling altogether at large. So much can be done w no strain to your body with the most relaxed hands slightly curved and cupped to grip, holding a limb out of gravity and giving the evr most sublte dance and encouragement through pull that you might save yourself a host of troubles pushing and pulling w lots of effort. Same goes for trigger point once the area has been tuned in and loosened so you may really feel what’s going on through the layers. You’ll be surprised what the lightly hooked end of a finger and a slight tug can do. Pushing may be a more natural action in the mechanics of the human body to act on other objects or beings, but when it comes to humans being, I find they and their bodies respond on every level being gently lulled to a dance floor than pushed. Just saying