Pressure and Duration of Treatment

I can almost hear you thinking, “What are you doing to those people? Doing a handstand on their neck, balancing on your thumbs while pushing on ceiling with your feet?” No, no, nothing like that. It may FEEL that way sometimes but the ceilings are too high, darn it! Seriously, we try to gage the amount of pressure we use to the tolerance of the client. I have worked on men, women, boys and girls from 97 years old to 3 or 4 years old. Obviously you have to tailor the pressure to each person because unless they can breathe and relax into the treatment, the tissue you’re working on won’t lengthen.

How long do you “keep mashing” the area you’re working on? Until it stops hurting. That’s it. There is no magic number of minutes or seconds. You do like granny did and only let go when it stops hurting. THAT takes some strength and stamina and may be one of the reasons many therapists decide to do some “less aggressive” form of treatment. This is not easy. If you don’t use proper body mechanics your body will scream at you about it eventually in the form of ganglion cysts in your wrist(s), sore thumbs, fingers, wrist(s), elbows, shoulders, neck, back…or all of the above. (What this means is that you have to take care of yourself in order to be able to take care of your clients. We’ll get into more of what that means specifically later.)

One of the things you should do if you are going to try any of these techniques is to start with the amount of pressure you can hold for as long as you need to for it to release. If you start light and it releases you can then go a little deeper and do the same thing again if there is more tenderness deeper in the tissue. (Remember, you can push to the bone with no pain through the muscle if it is the proper length.) This is really a key point. When you do this work you will either release the tissue or aggravate the tissue. You aggravate it by stopping before the tissue is released completely. When tissue releases it feels like your thumbs, for example, are pushing into a stick of frozen butter that thaws and then softens to the point that they sink into the stick of butter, all the way through to the butter tray. You can also tell this is happening because the person who is being worked on will; breath more evenly; begin to converse with you again, (whereas they usually stop when the pain is most intense); begin to move more freely through the range of motion that, say, their shoulder is moving in; tell you that the pain is less, almost gone, gone…usually with a look of complete surprise on their face! You should then just move to the next area. Which is the next area? Which is the first area? Good question!

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Series 1 Continued:
Where to Start?
Ice or Heat