What does massage ‘do?’

Is that a bit of a strange question coming from a therapist do you think?
After all, it seems pretty obvious to most, if not all, what massage does. It fixes things.
Doesn’t it?

Honestly? No, it doesn’t. And that’s where we have a problem. Because some massage therapists will tell you it does.

Now to be fair, they’re only repeating what they were taught on their course. Why wouldn’t they? They’re there to learn, and they’re being taught by someone who has been doing it for some time, and who has gone through the training/education they’re going through.
All makes perfect sense. BUT.

A lot of the things we believed that massage ‘does’, we now know doesn’t. We as therapists can’t change tissues, we can’t ‘palpate’ or feel many of the muscles we were told we could. In effect, we don’t have those magic fingers that can detect a human hair under several pages of paper.
And we need to stop teaching that we do and can.

What we can do is touch skin. In that skin, there are many, many nerves, and we are hoping to interact with them in a way which helps.
That is our best guess at what we can achieve when massaging a client.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t help someone, FAR from it.

We can’t, though, ‘fix’ anyone (that assumes that they are broken).

Massage comes in different forms. I’ll call them relaxing, firm, sports.
What they all have in common is that they ALL only touch the skin.

‘Firm’ means the therapist leans heavier. That doesn’t mean that they can get ‘deeper’, just that they lean heavier into the skin (I watched a video demo yesterday of how get ‘deeper’ – the person just used more bodyweight in the area they were working on!).
I mean, how can they move the top layer of tissue out of the way to get to the tissues underneath? Just not possible. We’re not that fragile. If we were, we’d be in real trouble.

‘Sports’ usually means focusing on a specific area highlighted by the client (legs for runners, say), and generally people think it should be painful. I’ve had plenty of people tell me in my short time how they had a Sports Massage before and were in agony for a few days after, as well as during it. Not good.

Relaxing is just as it sounds.


The difference between the 3? The weight used by the therapist. The techniques are pretty much the same (in terms of massage).

I think we need to be a bit more honest in what we say we’re doing.
We don’t fix people. We don’t have magical powers to feel things deep in the tissues.
We don’t need to see people ‘X’ number of times to be able to ‘sort’ something.
We touch people nicely, we hope that it is an experience that they benefit from, and that helps them with any pain they may have.
If we do that well, then we may see them again. Through choice, not necessity.

Have a great week.