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Elaine Calenda BIO
Elaine Calenda has been a massage therapy educator for over 28 years. She graduated from the Swedish Institute in 1979 with her CMT and gained clinical work experience with Dr. Richard Bachrach at the Center of Osteopathic & Sports Medicine in New York City. Elaine was an instructor at the Swedish Institute for six years. She is the Academic Dean at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy where she teaches Sports, Orthopedic, and Medical Massage.
Elaine contributed to the development of the AOS Medical Massage course and she has participated in multiple research projects including: “The Effects of Massage for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome” and “Chronic Tension Headache.”
Elaine is dedicated to the advancement of the massage profession and she is a member of the Massage Therapy Research Consortium. She writes for massage and CAM publications, she designs anatomical charts and she is frequently quoted as a massage expert by various health-related media venues. She is a member of the teaching team in the Orthopedic and Sports Massage Certificate Program and she teaches Structural Kinesiology, Anatomy & Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Medical Massage.
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Elaine Calenda is an innovative and superlative healing arts educator. I strongly recommend her Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD as an excellent way to enhance your palpation and clinical skills. For three decades Elaine has set the standard for massage therapy training. She is a passionate, articulate and humorous
educator. Her style reflects her holistic values and top-notch expertise.
ROBERT KING
Co-Founder and former Owner,
Chicago School of Massage Therapy
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Elaine Calenda - Frozen Shoulder Syndrome
Elaine, tell us how you landed here in Boulder, CO?
A friend who is also a massage therapist moved out here about three years before I did and she invited me to come out to Boulder. For me, a native New Yorker, it felt like a million miles away. So I came out one weekend 1991, and the director at the time asked me if I wanted to teach and a month later I was out here living and working. When I came out to teach I was like ‘wow it’s everything my friend Iris said and more,’ and I was ready to leave New York after 18-19 years. Coming out here that one weekend, the students and the staff were so pleasant to be around I thought ‘well this could be a good life.’
You made the career choice to get involved with massage before you arrived in Colorado. How did you get started?
Well I used to massage my father’s neck, and my mom’s feet and my brother’s back. All our friends used to come over and weight lift because we had weights in our basement and so I just got into working on people. I can’t tell you how many people I have interviewed the last two months, maybe about twenty people and I think about fifteen of those people said, when I asked them the same question, that ‘well I’ve always been natural at it, I have a knack for it’.
I think a good percentage of people who go into massage have that sort of knack for it, using their hands that way. And people have told them so they get the bright idea of making a living out of it. So that really started it but then, my brother gave me a newspaper clipping from the New York Times about the Swedish Institute, which is a massage school in New York City and that’s where I went right out of high school. So this is all I’ve ever done, and I think its great 27 years later and I’m still having fun with it.
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A couple of years after I graduated, I started teaching at the Swedish Institute, so I’ve been teaching for about 23 years too. And I love it, you captivate the body, they can’t smoke, they can’t heckle you, they can’t leave the room, so it’s great. People always say ‘Elaine why don’t you become a stand up comic’ and I think ‘why do I need to perform in those stinky places?’ and have people heckle me and not be able to feel them. So it’s really a control trip here.
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I’ve heard that you’re great at using humor as a tool to help people learn and remember things. And I’ve seen you in action in Studio B on the Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD . . .
Yeah, that’s for sure. I always enjoyed teachers who made me laugh and let us laugh, at ourselves and at them and just didn’t take life too seriously because that’s when I think you really start tightening up, our muscles tighten up.
When students laugh, and they laugh a lot in my classroom, I think their recall of techniques improves. They’ll call me three, four years later and say ‘Elaine, I still use those techniques you showed me’ and that’s the biggest compliment I can get. They are really out there making it work, making people feel better.
Boulder seems to attract cultural creatives and open-minded people; was that appealing to you?
It did take some time to get used to people saying ‘hi’ that I didn’t even know. It took me about a year to stop turning around to see who was following me. I was a New Yorker through and through and it took me a while to get used to this culture.
So that New York street sense followed you right out here to Colorado?
It did but once I got the hang of it, I realized that this is a healthy way to live. I was never a city person, not really. I was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Germany, as an Army brat. We arrived in New York City, in the 1960’s during the race riots. I didn’t realize it at the time, but from 1966 to 1992 I was a nervous wreck, even though I didn’t know it. After I moved out here, I realized that you could just be calm, you could see the whole sky at once, and you could enjoy nature and see varmints, deer and everything in its natural habitat.
I’ve become calmer by New York standards, but as far as folks in Colorado are concerned, they think that I am still a New Yorker.
So you can take the person out of New York, but you can’t completely take New York out of the person. Maybe a little bit of New York isn’t a bad thing.
Actually, my students really like it. I do put on the NY accent sometimes and they laugh and everything. When I first got here, it made me seem more serious. People would say, ‘well you know you should ask Elaine because she’s very technical, she’s very clinical.’ Whenever there was a challenge or a problem or somebody just needed to be tough, they would just call me over.
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The thing was, I didn’t know that I was a sensitive
person; I was too busy being tough. That was one
of the things I noticed the second I left New York,
that the static was gone, and how that static
energy was really killing me, literally taking life
out of me. When I arrived here I was able to relax
that and didn’t have to use all of that self-defensive
armor anymore, so I was really able to tune in and
be a better practitioner. And not just a technical
practitioner but also a real sensory aware
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practitioner. I’ve learned a lot about healing. I was a technician until I got here, I think. And I’ve been teaching all kinds of classes here, like anatomy and physiology.
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Tell us a little about the Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD instructional program and how you decided to do it.
I started working with frozen shoulder in my early 20s, in an osteopath office, with doctor Richard Bachrach. Since then, there have been many times when I have been frustrated with frozen shoulder and other stiff joints in the traditional way. One day I asked a client to turn over onto her side, and that’s where the side shoulder mobilization techniques came in. It was the first day that I felt like I had made some real progress, in working with the shoulder because the next time that she came in she was able to raise her arm for the first time in months above 90 degrees.
Your Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD program demonstrates how to position clients to work on the shoulder most effectively. Does this produce better recovery?
Yes, clients regain mobility a lot quicker than with the standard pro-pine position. Seeing this gave me the confidence to move out of two-dimensional ways of treating people and really get into three dimensional rotation techniques. That’s what gave it the edge that it really needed.
And you feature a real frozen shoulder client in the DVD?
I think it’s important to have a live model to demonstrate with, someone who can tell their story to make it real. She fell off a ski lift that was coming in and fractured her shoulder so she had a pretty bad stiff joint. Also then to give people hope that no matter where they are in their life, they can get better through massage therapy.
The clinical name for Frozen Shoulder Syndrome is Adhesive Capsulitis? Is that scar tissue?
Scar tissue is created from a fracture swelling that hardens. It also comes from fear that’s locked into the muscle. We demonstrate resistance exercises on the DVD. Doing those over and over helps the body to understand that it is no longer in trouble.
A big part of frozen shoulder rehabilitation involves taking something called the shrug mechanism that locks the shoulder up and in to the socket AND splinting which holds a part of the body close to the center. Shrugging and splinting are the hardest things to treat. The fracture heals, the person becomes more mobile but what often remains is a holding pattern that sinks way down into the sub-conscious. That’s the hard part to treat because you’ve got to convince the body that it’s okay. And it takes a lot of convincing. That’s another reason why this Frozen Shoulder DVD instructional program is a good idea, not just for massage therapists but also for physical therapists and chiropractors.
Can viewers of this Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD use your techniques to deal with other ailments or problems that clients may have?
The instructional program includes neck work that helps to work the deeper layer of muscles on both the front and side of the neck.
We also include some upper back tension techniques. We do a 16-17 minute back routine that covers not just how to work on loosening the shoulder blade, but also how to get rid of deep seated upper back tension, which enables the client to regain normal breathing patterns.
Researchers are finding that many musculo-skeletal problems originate from or are exacerbated by the fact that we don’t breathe properly. It’s important for massage therapists to help people by not only asking clients to take deep breaths but also to make it possible for them to do so. Helping clients relax their accessory breathing muscles -- which is what causes us to breathe shallowly -- to relieve restrictions on the diaphragm enables them to breathe deeply and more normally, more healthfully.
Who’s most at risk to have frozen shoulder problems besides someone who has had the misfortune of falling off a ski lift?
Besides injuries, the biggest category of people to get frozen shoulder is women between 40 and 70 years old. In these cases they are not sure what the cause is. Some people think it’s connected to some sort of hereditary or some viral thing that just infects the body and chooses this joint in particular. Other people are affected more in their jaw, their lower back, or their knees. But when it gets you in the shoulder it’s just a strange thing.
So what’s the usual medical protocol for clients with frozen shoulder syndrome?
Many patients go directly to orthopedic surgeons who in many cases will crack you open and do surgery to see if they can clean up the joint but sometimes there’s nothing to clean up. That’s one of the things that makes frozen shoulder syndrome mysterious.
So massage provides a non-invasive alternative to surgery. Is there any way you can help massage therapists zero in on clients who have frozen shoulder syndrome or may be getting close to it?
It’s great if you can catch them early but a lot of times people come to see us as their last resort. If they are lucky, they may already be working with a massage therapist trained to recognize these limitations because they are so obvious.
People suffering from frozen shoulder syndrome are so obviously different than someone who is just stiff. This is somebody who has a pathological immobility in the shoulder and the scapula and a restriction in what is called the scapula-humeral rhythm, which is how your shoulder blade slides on the ribs as you lift your arm. If that can’t happen and your shoulder blade is stuck to your ribs, no matter how great your ball and socket are doing, your arm won’t be able to go past 90 degrees because that is the point where the scapula starts to slide. If your shoulder blade is stuck, you’re going to be stuck right there.
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Do you think some people live with Frozen Shoulder Syndrome and just think, ‘well, I’m getting older, so I guess it’s normal to have aches and pains?’
They do. The category of people we are talking about will mysteriously get well again about a year and a half later. Eventually, they are going to get better and they are going to have more natural range of motion restored.
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But it’s not like you can’t treat them, just because they will get better in a year and half. In fact using the massage techniques on this Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD, will enable clients to get better a lot faster with a lot less pain AND have more of their movement restored AND feel a lot better sooner.
So it sounds like this DVD helps massage therapists diagnose and pin point problems and provide some preventive massage therapy to their clientele.
They’ll be able to recognize the condition and more readily assess it since we really don’t do diagnosis. A massage therapist will say ‘I can help you, but I really need to know what is not going on in your joint.’ They have to rule out any calcium deposits or other things that will show up on an X-ray or MRI. Get those ruled out first and seek out a doctor’s referral.
Tell us about the touch table that you use to better demonstrate your technique on the DVD?
My partner and I created and used a special touch table with a see-through surface during the filming of this DVD so that practitioners can see what the teacher’s hands are doing underneath the body.
This means that people can see what I’m doing underneath a person’s neck, when they are lying face up which is something that you can’t see in a normal classroom. It also provides a better view underneath the shoulder blade because there is a lot of work; a lot of technique that takes place while the client is lying on their back. With the touch table, you see how my hands go up underneath the shoulder blade, mobilize it against the rib cage and break up those adhesions.
That provides a real learning enhancement for viewers, a distinctive feature of your program.
It does help to relieve a lot of the frustration. And I mean students had a lot of ‘Ahs’ when it came out.
Tell us about the client you treat in the Frozen Shoulder DVD. She’s a real person who had Frozen Shoulder Syndrome.
We had Sandra, who was our model describe her full injury, her surgery and her medical treatment. This is an important thing because massage therapists have to be very good listeners and then have to document all that. In chapter 4 we talk about all that.
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She had gone through the standard medical
procedures and she was looking at another
several months of just slow rehabilitation because
it’s a pretty slow process. And then she ran into
me at a clinic I was supervising here. She was
going to our student clinic.
I walked into her room and I saw that limitation
which is just classic and started working on her
and she was just “You know lady, I think you
can help me out.”
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I said to her, “Well I’m looking for someone just like you to star in our video would you be a volunteer?” She totally just allowed herself to be part of this project, and was very open so that was a good thing.
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Did you reduce her rehabilitation time?
Yeah, by about six months.
These techniques help people get better much quicker. It takes at least two thirds of the time off of that healing time and I do expand the range of mobility a lot. Plus my techniques improve the mobility in their neck, their breathing, their general comfort in their body and it prevents them from injuring it again.
I also help clients develop good body awareness which most people don’t have, unless you’re an athlete or runner, they’re very tuned in. Day to day people like you and me have to learn how to pay attention. We’re born with an innate sense of where we are in space and it gets compromised by sitting still, driving cars and being in these positions that are not natural. Sitting in front of a computer all day is not natural and we lose our body sense.
Elaine, tell us about your philosophy of massage therapy? You’re not just teaching techniques, you’re really teaching a whole philosophy and approach.
Good massage therapists are balanced, mature, sensitive creatures. My goal as a teacher is to help practitioners go out and be the best they can be. Ethics are important too. Ethical practitioners really buy into the idea of upholding standards and participating in organizations associated with massage therapy.
Tell us about the curriculum path that you recommend to people coming into the massage profession.
We really like people to come in and start out with 120 hours of shiatsu. They get to stay dressed, get to know their classmates. They learn good body mechanics, how to use their hands, and all other kinds of good body language. They learn a lot before they even start doing Swedish type massage.
After they start learning Swedish, they start to realize what kinds of things they are interested in. Some people arrive here with a focus, a specific interest. A lot of athletes will come here as a second career and they come in knowing they want to do sports massage. We also have nurses who know they want to work with people who have cancer or work with people who are really ill. So some people know what they want to do when they get here. For others it just dawns on them after about 500 hours of study; they’ll say ‘you know what, I am starting to like working with people who have paralysis or people who have real orthopedic problems like frozen shoulder, like post surgical knee, post surgical complications, getting people’s mobility back.’ And then you have your sports massage and pediatric massage, your oncology. I mean it’s really neat.
So you see many students who are naturally attracted to the massage profession.
Yes, I got into it my first year. I wanted to go move to San Juan, Puerto Rico where I had relatives working in spas and hotels there. I loved Puerto Rico. So I started working in the big fancy hotels there. I got jobs right away with my impressive diploma from New York and I sat in an air-conditioned room day after day waiting for people to come in. I was bored and I was 19 and I didn’t last but three months before going back to New York.
Then I got a job with a dance doctor who specialized in dance therapy. Every day, dancers, little broken dancers would come in from the American Ballet Theatre, from Broadway shows, and we would put them back together. We got good tickets to a lot of good shows. Even today, that’s something I specialize in -- the lower extremities, the legs feet, alignment. It moved up in later years to all kinds of orthopedic ailments, including frozen shoulder.
- This interview with Elaine Calenda was taped in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2006 by Jan Liverance. © At Peace Media LLC
View flash video clips of Elaine Calenda’s Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD seminar,
visit Frozen Shoulder Syndrome.
At Peace Media is the exclusive wholesale distributor of Elaine Calenda’s Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD. For more info, please contact sherry@atpeacemedia.com
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Art Riggs - BIO
Art Riggs, C.M.T., is a Certified Advanced Rolfer® and massage therapist who has been teaching bodywork since 1988. A lifetime of hard physical activity and high level athletic pursuits including ultra-marathons led him to bodywork, first as a grateful recipient, and later as a student. The fulfillment he experienced in both receiving and performing bodywork led him away from his graduate studies in Exercise Physiology at the University of California, Berkeley to a full time career as a Rolfer and teacher of Deep Tissue Massage. He has conducted numerous workshops for health spas and for medical professionals, including physical therapists, and has assisted in Rolf Institute trainings.
For the first ten years of his practice, he specialized in myofascial release at a physical therapy clinic where an interest in the treatment of injuries was cultivated. He has worked with several Olympic athletes, professional football and basketball players, and professional dancers and musicians to treat injuries and to improve performance. However, his teaching and the practice of working with the general population to provide a better awareness of their bodies and allow more ease and comfort in their everyday lives remains the most gratifying aspect of his work. Art Riggs lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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ART RIGGS
Certified Advanced Rolfer®, C.M.T.
DEEP TISSUE MASSAGE and MYOFASCIAL RELEASE
Art, how did you get started with massage and body work?
I worked hard and played hard with athletics my whole life – I had a pretty beat up body. About twenty-two years ago, I received my first massage. I had never had any bodywork at all. It made such a profound change in my body and since I was at the crossroads career-wise at the time, I said why don’t I go into this professionally? It was actually a bit frightening since I had more of a scientific background in academics.
What sports were you doing?
Well I played almost all sports, but at the time I got injured I was putting most of my eggs in the running basket. I had run a 100-mile race and was running 100 miles a week, hence the problems. Actually my knees were also beat up from prior football injuries and from years and years of heavy-duty marathons and ultra marathons.
So, that rocky road of injuries finally led you to your first massage and bodywork experience?
I didn’t realize how stiff I was, or how inflexible because that wasn’t a factor in running. But once I felt the changes in my body from the massage work, it was profound. I said ‘wow’, what if I could be helping other people in this way? So I took a gamble and I’m definitely glad I did.
Your massage and bodywork ‘epiphany’ addressed real-life physical issues. But you obviously found it intellectually intriguing as well.
Yes, we all want to do something meaningful, and I felt that if I could be giving the gift that I received from that bodywork to people, then I would feel like I was doing something important with my life.
Tell us about your massage educational path?
At that time, the Rolf Institute required that you have a massage certificate so I enrolled in massage school as a first step. I was somewhat at a disadvantage because I didn’t have a lot of experience. But I did have a background in exercise physiology. So as far as the anatomy and the kinesiology and the understanding of that, I had a bit of a head start compared to a lot of the students.
Was this career training transition pretty smooth?
It was actually quite difficult because my scientific background emphasized left-brain activity. I had to re-tool my thought processes and teach myself how to express my more intuitive side and go with that. Massage school helped me learn a lot about myself. I was always pretty much a giver and it was a new experience to learn how to take and to receive a massage. That was really good for me and it expanded the way I related to people.
Are there any particular teachers you remember, who had a positive influence on you?
Almost all had a positive influence although as I progressed with my skills, I confronted conflicts in philosophy or techniques. The most influential instructors were my Rolfing teachers—a physical therapist from Stanford, Helen James and two senior faculty at the Rolf Institute, Michael Salveson and Jan Sultan. One of the most influential classes I ever took was in Cranial-Sacral therapy. Learning to work with the more subtle rhythms of the body is a great skill in itself, but it enabled me to soften my deep work and not try to force tissue into my pre-conceived molds.
As you grew in your practice, at what other massage institutes did you work at or train?
I’ve mentioned the cranial-sacral classes I took at the Esalen Institute. Most of my other continuing education has been through the Rolf Institute. One of the biggest learning tools I utilize is to seek out established experts and just get an appointment to receive work from them. I learn best by feeling the work performed on my own body. That’s why I don’t teach large classes but instead try to get my hands on students as much as possible and to work through the hands of students when they are working.
Have you always practiced in California?
Yes, in Oakland right across from San Francisco. My first twelve years I worked in Berkeley in my own private practice, and so because of my own knee surgeries I got to know some of the physical therapists, and work with the physical therapy group part time doing their myofascial work.
It really sounds like you’ve had a pretty rich exposure to different modalities and bodywork practices.
Absolutely. I think that has been tremendously beneficial. Why? Most schools have a particular point of view. My eclectic perspective enables me to treat all sorts of different people in my practice. I don’t feel like I’m rigidly bound into one single approach. Because of exercise physiology, for example, I do a lot of work with clients to create an exercise prescription for strengthening. Whether dealing with a knee problem or hip immobility, I think a lot of therapists bind themselves to hands-on work. I think it’s important to get people empowered, and to help your clients to help themselves rather than keep coming to you just to have you do the same thing.
Are people getting more enlightened about using massage in a preventive way? Are you seeing any attitude shifts?
There’s much more knowledge out there. Even high schools have weight rooms now where they’re strengthening areas that are weak. So yes, absolutely. I think that virtually every college team has somebody doing hands on work for their athletes. Pro teams and individual athletes also have their own body workers too.
Tell us about your 7 DVD series - Deep Tissue Massage and Myofascial Release.
I have looked at other deep tissue massage videos under an hour and half long. Some are fine but you can’t teach it in an hour and a half! So I thought I would create a more in-depth three-hour instructional program. Well by the time I had three hours of material I had just covered what I considered the fundamentals of touch. So I just kept going because I was that far into it, and pretty soon I had 11 hours of video, which we edited down to 7 hours plus. I’m happy with it because it goes into much more of the subtle aspects rather than just teaching specific strokes.
So it’s a different approach to video instruction?
Yes, a lot of videos say do this stroke or do that stroke. With a longer program, I had the latitude of just going and not having a set amount of material to get into a one-hour and a half DVD. My teaching style is informative and demonstrative but not very formal, which makes it applicable for almost anyone. I’ve had osteopaths and chiropractors write to comment and to say how much it helped them and also brand new massage therapists right in the midst of their training so I think it’s got sort of an eclectic usefulness to different people on different levels. I get a lot of good feedback to the entire program and people seem to really enjoy it and rather than just teaching them a couple of new tricks it has changed the way they work, so that’s gratifying.
Your program also provides some specific approaches for certain common afflictions too.
Yes, the last two DVDs deal with what I call troubleshooting. They give a therapist specific ways to deal with plantar fasciatis, achilles tendonitis, tennis elbow, and more. These are things we all feel and come in contact with in our practices. I also cover how to talk with your clients about things they can do at home for self care.
How is the content organized?
You know, I have taught for many years. So I designed this DVD program along the lines of my 80-hour deep tissue class that I teach. The table of contents is printed in a pamphlet that shows where you can look things up on each individual DVD so you don’t have to go hunting around.
Do you recommend that viewers watch the DVD in numbered sequence?
The first time through, virtually everyone should watch the whole program rather than jumping around. The knowledge is progressive and incremental.
Your teaching style and philosophy get rave reviews. Why?
When I teach, I try to let people work intuitively. If you understand how a shoulder works, no matter what problem a person brings in, you’re going to know how to create a better balance in the shoulder. That’s why I go into the anatomy of it and different positioning. There are an awful lot of positioning options. People run into problems in their body not in the neutral positions, but rather throughout their range of motion. Most of the techniques dealing with various issues try to put the client body into a stretch so that as you work, you get a release of tight tissue rather than working in the neutral short position.
Tell us about the difference between deep tissue massage and the more relaxing forms of massage. How do you know what’s best? Do clients know what’s best for them?
This is a huge subject and in some ways upsetting. I see a polarization between so called “relaxation” and “therapeutic massage” as classes move towards a more clinical and therapeutic approach, and more continuing education hours are required.
I almost sense condescension from “serious” therapists who brag that they no longer do relaxation massage. Actually a lot of pain studies are more and more pointing to the central nervous system as a primary participant in the perception of pain. Very serious benefits can come from the relaxation of the sympathetic nervous system. My theory is that good bodywork needn’t choose between these poles. You wouldn’t want to work too deeply for a whole hour or more because it can overwhelm the system, but many relaxation based therapists lose clients because they don’t know how to solve the invariable problems that clients bring in, and deep work is often the best way to accomplish this by freeing adhesions.
Many people have only heard of myofascial release. Could you explain it briefly please?
This is another huge area and myofascial release is practiced in many ways. Basically it implies that we aren’t just working with the contractile aspects of muscle fibers, but with fascial connections, which are non-contractile (at least voluntarily) and short. Any method that stretches these components rather than just squeezing tissue could be called myofascial release.
There is a lot of discussion, and argument, over what contraindications or ailments a therapist should steer away from in massage. How do you personally feel about that?
When in doubt - if you don’t feel safe, don’t work on an area. That said, I think that most of the hesitation therapists feel is based upon lack of knowledge rather than a firm understanding. Beginning classes, with good cause, usually caution students to take it easy until they have cultivated their touch. When I go over the anatomy of an area, students loose their trepidation as they begin to develop a better understanding of the risks and the benefits. I included about 30 minutes in the first DVD disc about the contra indications. Once you learn some basics, you can work with confidence.
What advice would you give to massage therapists who have recently started their practice?
Everyone has their own personality that will present obstacles to success and likewise, serve to their advantage, so there are no universal rules. The main thing would be to realize that it takes several years to have a full practice. Don’t rush to judge yourself by how busy you are. I know great therapists who aren’t busy because of their business skills and vice versa. Keep trying to grow, take classes, relate to other therapists not as competitors, and learn to express who you are as a therapist rather than trying to fit into a mold given you in your early training.
The key to success is to distinguish yourself from the competition by doing something rather than trying to do the same thing as everyone else but just better—better is a pretty subjective word. This can take shape in a lot of ways including who you are with your nature, or by doing techniques that are different from the run of the mill work.
Get your hands on as many people as possible early on. There are many opportunities at spas or working for gyms or chiropractors. Ultimately, try for your own practice. I see a lot of burn out among those working for others, as they often perform too many massages and don’t feel appreciated.
What about classes and workshops – big versus small?
I try to keep my classes small because I want to get my hands on the students and have them feel my hands. Huge workshops of 50 to 100 people are very popular now, but all you are doing is watching the teacher when you might as well watch a video program on DVD because you don’t get that hands on direction in the large classes.
But that’s how a lot of these CEU courses are done at various AMTA conventions – they’re huge.
I’m not saying that they are not good classes. But I learn the most from interacting with recognized experts. I can feel their hands on me for an hour and a quarter or whatever our session is and then I learn at a very deep level. That’s why I teach my classes at an upper limit of 20 people, because I am constantly working on people and they are feeling that. In a cranial sacral class, how do you know that your partner is not pushing three times as hard as they need to or not hard enough? That’s the same dilemma for a deep tissue class. Just because you are with a partner, there is just as good a chance that you will be learning bad technique as good, unless someone is there to give one-on-one supervision.
What’s your feeling about the impact of massage on a therapist’s own hands, fingers, and arms? How should they protect themselves?
This is huge. I know physical therapists that have had to change professions because of overuse injuries. Thumbs are the most vulnerable and should not be used for deep work. Much of my video is about biomechanics and proper use of energy. If you are straining and using muscles rather than your body weight and core energy, then you are risking injury and your work won’t feel good to your client and won’t be as effective if you are forcing things. Always work within your limits.
What do you remember about being a massage school student that you put into practice as a professional?
There’s much that I’ve taken into my practice:
- How to be with clients in a nonjudgmental way
- How to work with tissue to stay present.
The best teachers conveyed ways to problem-solve, rather than getting a set level of routine.
How do you recommend that massage therapists avoid falling into a rut or routine?
The thing that I see with my students so much is that their early teachers set themselves up as gurus. When you know nothing, everyone seems really smart. Some of these teachers establish strict rules about how you should or shouldn’t do something.
Students of massage should not be working with training wheels for the rest of their life. You need to develop the confidence to expand. I think that I had a lot of really good training. Growing into your massage work involves letting go of your early restrictions in order to let yourself grow. Teachers will say, “Never work near the spine or never work on the front of the neck”. Well you know if you’re going to be doing good work you have to learn how to work right with the spine and you have to learn to work deeply in the front of the neck but a lot of people will tell themselves, ‘Oh, I’m never supposed to work on the front of the neck’.
What’s next for Art Riggs?
I wish I knew. I never would have known I would be here when I started doing bodywork…I was 40 at the time. It’s funny how life puts something in your path and then you have to make something out of it. I’m awfully lucky to be doing what I do and certainly am not bored, but it is always nice to feel that you are moving forward rather than back. As I get older, I realize the importance of non-work time too, and finally have let go of judging myself by others’ standards about what is a success.
Art, thank you for your time.
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