catching up

Wow - starting school has been even more intensely busy than I imagined. I apologize for the total abandonment of the blog - most of my life just got moved to the back burner.

That said, here's a wee bit of what I've been up to in the last month and a half:

More awesome Deep Tissue Massage classes from Brian Utting

One on QL (quadratus lumborum), psoas and the diaphragm and one on chest and shoulders (subscapularis, pec minor, and all manner of connective tissue around the sternum). Both were cozy little classes in his living room in Ballard and left me feeling relaxed and excited to be doing massage. It really was amazing to see how much easier it was to breathe afterward, especially with all the work around the sternum.

Needles, old folks and early mornings

Some of the things that have scared me most about this program - nasogastric tubes and catheters (yep, tubes going through nostrils and into stomachs or up ureters to bladders) we fortunately got to practice on eerily life-like mannequins instead of on each other. We did, however, get to poke each other with needles in several places. I was amazed to discover that the injections didn't hurt at all, but the pokes for a simple glucose test sure did! (At least to my massage-therapist fingertips - we ended up poking my earlobe, which was not bad at all.)

Perhaps the hardest part has been the idea of not just getting up, but actually being AT my clinical site at 6:15 am on Tuesdays. Yikes - I haven't been up before 8am on a regular basis in years! I've spent two days with my first resident, "B," and just briefly met my second - "A."
"B" is the sweetest little old lady, and still quite lucid and capable. She's made me think about how very little time I've spent with actually old people in my life, and how sad that is.

More updates to come!

Dear Ducky

Oooh! Oooh! I forgot that as the author of a blog, I may get to respond to questions from readers, like Dear Abby or Dan Savage.

Very exciting.

I would *love* to answer questions, if you have them - you can leave them in a comment, as Laura B. did with my first question, or email them to sara@waxingmoonmassage.com

So let's get to her question:

Dear Massage Therapist,

Do you have any tips for relieving necks that are stiff from from hours sitting in front of a computer screen. (Tips that, of course, would only be stop gap measures between Waxing Moon Massage appointments?)

Signed,
Sore Entrepreneur

Dear Sore Entrepreneur,

Most of us know that we don't stretch enough - we notice when the incessant nagging of our bodies finally overcomes our absorption in whatever we're doing on the computer for long enough to get food or run to the bathroom. It seems like many people think that stretching is something they need to set aside time to do - like taking a yoga class, or spending a half hour doing it in the morning.

While those things would also be great, I often try to encourage my clients to take one minute each hour at work just to shake out the position they've been in.

Most people who work with computers a lot have shoulders that roll inward and downward, so taking a moment to lift your shoulders up, then roll them backward in a few circles can help open up your chest.

You'll probably notice yourself taking in a deeper breath as you do this - some of the most important muscles involed in breathing are between the ribs (internal and external intercostals) and between the ribs and cervical spine (scalenes.) Unsurprisingly, these muscles can get pretty stuck together when we spend hours shallowly breathing and locked in position.

The scalenes are flat, sheath-like muscles on the front and sides of the neck that run under the clavicles (collarbones) and insert on the ribs. Moving your neck (gently!) through its full range of motion, as much as possible, helps to loosen things up, but to really work your scalenes, you can do a "pin & stretch."

To do this, you shorten the muscle that you're wanting to stretch - i.e. tipping your head forward and to the right to shorten the muscle on the front right side of your neck. Then use the side of your finger to gently "pin" the muscles in place - right above the clavicle is a good spot - and slowly move your head back in the other direction. You don't really need very much pressure to do this, and you'll probably find you don't need to move very much to feel the stretch. You can experiment with moving to different areas to see what feels most useful.

Just remember that there are lots of nerves and other delicate structures in the neck - if you can feel a pulse, don't hold pressure there. Use common sense to avoid things like shooting pain/tingling or compressed breathing passages.

Last thing - you can also do a pin & stretch on your forearms, which get tired from typing and mousing. Again, shorten the muscles by placing your palms up, then bending at the wrist toward you. Pin, and gently stretch. It's nice, too, to do a little kneading and squeezing on your forearms to fluff them up.

I hope that helps!

Your Faithful Massage Therapist,
Ducky

p.s. I know that my name is Sara and not Ducky, but it's way more fun to have a pen name, don't you think?

p.p.s. Just a reminder that as a massage therapist it is not within my scope of practice to actually give clients exercises to help with specific issues - that would fall within the purvue of physical therapy - these are just some general ideas, with which you may experiment at your own peril (and hopefully, relief!)

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!