Prolong Your Manual Therapy Career
According to recent studies, the average length of a manual therapist’s career is 5 years. Many of us began in massage schools where a large portion of the curriculum was receiving bodywork after we observed and performed the techniques. Why I believe so many therapists have a short career in this field because they never continued to regularly get worked on themselves. If you allow your hands, arms, and backs to tighten up from the strain of treating your clients, your work will become laborious, uncomfortable, painful, and no fun. When you allow your own body to become congested you lose your sensitivity in treating your clients.
From the beginning of my career I did many trades, but one year into my practice, I began training others to do the techniques that I was employing, teaching has allowed me to master these techniques. My classes are 2-3 hours long, consisting of observing the student’s posture, discussing their discomfort, and what/ we are about to do to remedy it. Working on the student and then having the student demonstrate on me. There has never been a period in my 45 years of bodywork where I haven’t been teaching my techniques and enjoying the process.
My quote, “We should age with wisdom and not rigidity,” comes from experiencing how beneficial quality bodywork is, however, I am often accused of acting like a five-year-old, probably from not aging in the typical “rigid,” manner.
There are many good techniques of bodywork and my four major influences (St. John. Neuromuscular therapy, Ida Rolf Structural Integration, visceral manipulation, and therapeutic stretching,) have been beneficial for the thousands of clients that I’ve treated, that I prefer to experience it myself when I am being treated. How long can a chef cook without tasting the food himself? By regularly experiencing my own treatment’s effects, I have also seen what the course of sessions should be, (i.e. 2-3 treatments weekly for 2-3 months in dealing with my hundreds of motor vehicle accidents including two of my own.)
I offer classes for the treatment of:
and challenge every MT or bodyworker reading this article to begin teaching what they are doing in their practice, to continually taste their own cooking, and reap the rewards of being in this important profession, one of the reasons we all got into this field in the first place. I bet a lot of manual therapists’ careers would not only be lengthened but they’d be greatly enhanced.