Barefoot Massage Open Challenge: 2024.4
Week 3: Addressing imbalances felt in your Diaphragm & Ribs while working
Welcome to the last week of this years Barefoot Massage Challenge! Over the past 3 weeks, we’ve shared exercises aimed at your hip flexors, down to ideas for conditioning your knees and ankles, and last week was all about your feet. We are working on getting your working body back on center so that the work flows through you easier, and we are trying to help you prevent injuries that Barefoot Massage Therapists might experience so that you can do this work forever!
This weeks focus for the Barefoot Massage Challenge is the next typical restriction we notice in Barefoot Massage Therapists across the industry: imbalances stemming from the diaphragm or ribs - and it’s a big one!
What’s in this post?
Blablabla: deep reads for deeper feets from Jeni Spring
Roll out your diaphragm with Ashley Shears
Strengthen your core with Ashley Shears
Diaphragm and pelvic floor alignment with Jeni Spring
Pelvis, lumbar and thoracic spine with Julie Marciniak
Inflammation-inducing foods with Mary-Claire Fredette
TLDR recap
But first, some “blablabla”:
This weeks focus on the diaphragm also spans to your available Thoracic mobility, which effects how you use your arms, how you initiate movement from your core, and what overall alignment you are using in your strokes. This all shapes your body mechanics!
Many LMT’s, ourselves included, have taken what they retained from any Continuing Education class and put it into practice, tweaked what they could to make it feel “right” and then just keep doing it that way unchecked. Once checked though, everything changes. Our instructor team has spent thousands of hours embodying Barefoot Massage. We observe ourselves, each other as well as our staff and students, we watch your videos on social media, we watch all styles of barefoot work to find the commonalities and challenges between each, and we also look outside the massage industry to find ways to enhance and ease the physical workload of this massage job we all love.
What’s interesting about Barefoot Massage body mechanics is that as instructors, we have to teach you the techniques within 2-3 days, and we are also watching your natural movements to find ways to bring you closer to how the average practitioner moves to create that stroke, while also finding ways to tweak that stroke as it’s working on that particular client to best fit your body effectively.
When you learned techniques and body mechanics in massage school, this was a long journey that meandered and allowed you to take more time exploring what feels natural, what are your strengths, and where your imbalances are. Continuing education classes aren’t afforded the luxury of time, which is why we encourage you to come back for more training, so that we can help you continue your development into this specific technique.
We realize that massage therapists need time to learn the strokes, then you need a second wave of time to explore how to refine your movements that create the stokes and support you. We hope this years Barefoot Massage Challenge helps you with that, but if you haven’t trained at the Center for Barefoot Massage ever or in a while - maybe it’s time you pop into a refresher or next-level class to get some personalized body mechanic tweaks. Gaining more nuggets of wisdom that apply to all Barefoot Massage strokes and body mechanics learned so far will help you on your continued barefoot evolution!
Back to the point of all this:
Massage therapists often flock to learning Barefoot Massage techniques so that they can give their hard working hands a break. Human nature, however, has other plans, and our instructor team is often correcting LMT’s on how hard everyone is squeezing their hands on the bars, or pulling from their arms, or bracing in their shoulders. LMT’s seem to think that a massage wasn’t good unless they themselves come out of the room sweating and tired. That’s not what we want for you!
Holding yourself in the bars will add more restrictions to your torso. You are bracing through your serratus, lats, subscap and pecs unnecessarily. Your breath is shorter, shallower, the diaphragm and intercostals are helping to stabilize you. Your neck and shoulders are likely shrugged. Your spiral rotation may become limited from this repetitive restraint, so spinal twists are a bigger stretch than ever for you. Your SI joint or your pelvis/hips in general may try to compensate for the lack of movement being allowed above, which could compromise alignment and function both on and off the table. One physical thing always leads to another at work and in life - so reducing restrictions will help the longevity of not just your career, but also the longevity and health of your body while you have it on this planet! (Plus, saving mental and physical energy is something we all want, right?!!)
Think of it this way: for every ounce of weight you hold up into the bars, you are loosing that pressure on the client. You don’t want to lift up so much of your weight into the bars that you start to push through your legs in order to give the client pressure. Learn to understand how to SHIFT gravity from your weight more than lift it off: that will start to create the effortlessness in your weight distribution, better movement initiation, and more ease in your upper torso.
Before you ever pull up into the bars, start with your feet grounded on their surfaces (likely one foot on the table, one on the client.) Find your alignment and get everything pointed towards where it needs to be. Feel your breath, and breathe into the spaces where you need to move from next. Initiate the first movement of your stroke from your pelvis/hips/core and roll the rest of your body into a stacked position to let gravity and inertia of direction take over, while you work on just shifting the weight between feet and only using the bars as a supportive guide.
I love suggesting in classes that Barefoot LMT’s hold their bars with their pinky up - this creates a moment of mindfulness as a conscious trick to make sure they aren’t squeezing the dowels to death. (You can’t do a pull up with your pinkies up, right? Try it, it’s harder!)
You can also try doing every stroke with just one hand on the bar, then switch and try the other hand. Move from your center. Notice how you use that arm within that stroke, and if it’s even necessary. Get feedback from your client about which version feels the deepest, or even the most connected to them.
Now, I’m not saying to forget about the bars entirely - but if you watched me massage, I spend more time with my arms down or resting in the strap than I do with them bilaterally up overhead. I’m constantly working on my own centered alignment while working - giving massage is a movement meditation for me, and the more I learn, the more it evolves. I hope the same for y’all!
How your bars are built, and where your strap is suspended makes all the difference in your body mechanics for ashiatsu barefoot massage. One size doesn't fit all. If you are a Center for Barefoot Massage Alumni, consider a consultation with one of our instructors to review your bar design and installation, as well as your strap set up. I can't watch Instagram videos, honestly, because too often I see bars built out of proportion, straps slung unsafely, and other overhead equipment-related variants that directly impact the body movements of the LMT negatively. Now, I know that every massage room and every bar-build presents it's own unique challenges that are sometimes unavoidable, but before you spend 5 years on a set of bars that could be doing more harm than good to your body, let us help you check your gear. Contact us at info@barefootmassage.com for help.
The following content will be available for free through July 1st, 2024. After then it (along with other “FEETured“ content, like a podcast!) will be a part of our paid subscription, $8/month or $80/year.
Rib & Diaphragm Help
Roll
Ashley Shears is our instructor in Tustin, California. Ashley has been a Barefoot Massage Therapist since 2015. Ashley uses yoga and self-myofascial release ball roll-outs as a therapeutic style of conscious corrective exercise for herself and her clients. She expanded her scope of practice by training with Jill Miller’s Yoga/Fitness Tune-Up programs to merge her work between the worlds of yoga, fitness, pain management, and myofascial self-care. The work she shares with us today is something she takes every client through: something we need also!
Strengthen
It’s Ashley again, dropping a movement-based exercise to help support your Barefoot body mechanics, working to coordinate movements between your arms, ribs, pelvis and legs through your breath. Try this exercise with Ashley to get this area of our bodies ready to move with intention and in an organic sequence.
Awareness #1
Jeni Spring has recently stepped deep into the world of Structural Integration after completing the Anatomy Trains certification program in 2023. After growing up training in modern dance and choreography, and as a trained-but-rarely-practicing Yoga Instructor, Jeni saves her movement nerdery for the massage classroom, combining the deeper awareness of moving alignment within gravity gained from Structural Integration. This little postural pose is a tiny nugget of knowledge that will go a long way in all of your standing strokes.
Awareness #2
Julie Marciniak is our North Carolina instructor who has been a Massage Therapist since 1992, a Barefoot Massage Therapist since 2002, a Certified Rolfer trained at the Rolf Institute starting in 1995 ultimately levelling up to become an Advanced Rolfer in 2018. Her long standing experience in the field and her ongoing studies/training in Structural Integration gives her insight to recognize efficient alignment and how that restricts movements - which is great for her clients and students. Julie’s tip today will help improve the comfort and ease of doing your seated strokes.
Awareness #3
Mary-Claire is our Cincinnati, Ohio instructor, and during the 2020 lockdown, she began her training as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. Mary-Claire shares a comprehensive guide on the importance of nutrition for those practicing Barefoot Massage. She does a quick dive into the impact of diet and hydration on muscle recovery, inflammation, and overall health, and offers practical advice on everyday nutrition.
TLDR?
Watch all sections of this weeks content in 1 video:
Did you miss any content?
Week 1: Hip Flexor exercises with Blablablog on Lubricaton
Week 2: Knees & Ankle exercises with Blablablog on the FasciAshi Strap
Week 3: Foot exercises with Blablablog on how your table impacts foot alignment
Week 4: Diaphragm & Rib exercises with Blablablog on body mechanics in the bars
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