Erector spinae & Brian Utting

About a month ago I finally treated myself to a satisfying continuing education class. The last couple I'd taken had either been disappointing (Breathworks) or good, but in an eat-your-vegetables kind of way (Professional Ethics for LMPs.) I spent the money because it was a class on Deep Tissue Massage of the Paraspinals, and I thought it would be a good mix of my favorite area - the neck - and the one I sometimes find the most frustrating - the lower back.

Also - it was taught by the Brian Utting, founder of the Brian Utting School of Massage, the only school that paralleled my beloved Brenneke in overall reputation and quality of instruction. (Before, of course, they were both bought out by Cortiva and turned into franchise schools, but that's another story.)

Anyway, I'd been longing for the warm, interactive learning environment I'd had at Brenneke, and hoped it would be a tiny sliver of those days.

Ah, such alchemy. While we bubbled and chatted through the morning, after lunch a calm settled over the room as we practiced our new techniques. Busy, content bees, we tended our sighing, yielding blossoms.

That is to say - it was amazing.

So my "take home," or most useful bit of information and technique I gained from the class, and the reason I started this post to tell you about has to do with the erector spinae.

In the illustration you can see what Brian said that surprised me - the erectors (iliocostalis, spinalis and longissimus) are ideally wide, flat sheaths of muscle. This is surprising because more often than not they feel like one big, heavy cable alongside the spine.

Chronic tension pulls the muscles taut and they roll in on themselves, then get stuck together as the tension limits movement and squeezes out the lubricating interstitial fluid, and - voila! - one ropy mass of muscle all glued together.

We don't notice what we're missing because the erectors are still able to do their main function - holding up the spine. The difference is that one long, linear slab of muscle connecting essentially two points is really only good for that one job.

What those wider, more flexible sheaths allow is what you see in belly dancers as they twist and undulate - a whole range of movements. We learned a technique for slow unraveling - a gentle, rocking finger friction along the spine - and I've been having fun integrating it into my massages.

Thanks, Brian.

p.s. there's a lot of questionable continuing ed. out there, and the Therapeutic Training Center is offering quality instruction at better rates than I've seen nearly anywhere else!