Winter Qi Chats | Week 10
Meet your new manual therapist…
This week we go over the therapeutic uses of the floor and how you can gain more from the ground up than you think!
It’s been beneath you this whole time!
Using the floor as a massage tools has been a part of my movement teaching repertoire for almost two decades. While there are many amazing techniques out there, I feel the self exploration can be a part of the process as you attempt to reset the nervous system via manual therapy.
However, your assumptions of massage is where you may be lost and making things worse! That’s where I want to lay some rules for better understanding HOW to use the floor as your massage platform.
RULES TO THE MASSAGE
Rule #1: Soft tissue - Soft equipment. All too often people feel they need to use hard balls or tools to DIG into their body so the tissues ‘breaks up’. Fascia doesn’t need much pressure and nor does lymph. And when you think of the muscles, don’t think of it like an arm wrestling session. In fact, that hypertonicity of the muscle (a ‘tight’ muscle) can be release with more gentle stimuli as that contraction message is coming from the brain. Ergo you need to get the brain’s attention via the muscle. Not override the muscle with a hard ball.
Rule #2: Keep at a sensory scale 3 out of 10. This comes back to Rule #1 with ‘less is more’ for the body. For the most part, the your body will respond to more gentle tissue manipulation rather than DEEP work where the body is A.) most likely already in a holding pattern for protection and B.) Deep, unwelcoming pressure will continue to enforce the protective contraction that the muscle is holding and you will further groove a pain loop than you will end that merry-go-round.
Rule #3 Shorten rather than lengthen. When we are ‘tight’ we feel we need to opposite to counteract that stiffness and we begin to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the muscle to ‘loosen’ it. But go back to the new knowledge that the contraction is coming from the brain and you are more the scientist in this massage session asking the body “why” versus a WWF wrestler forcing an opponent to succumb to your insane pressure and yield to your strength. Bringing the ending points of the muscles closer together (either via passive movement or contractile holds) will reset the brain’s holding pattern on that area of the body and GENTLY help you find relief!
Rule #4 Hold and breathe. People get super excited about ‘scrubbing’ away the tension as if you were one gigantic pencil and you can erase anything disagreeable with friction. There are times for everything and sometimes, you need to just pause, hold and breathe to tap into the nervous system. In the moments of pause, you may become more aware of your protective holding patterns and through that realization and breath - you may be able to gently find your release!
Neuro-Qi Tip o’the day!
Get down and explore…
Have the tools: a bath towel, a hand towel and any balls you have around your home
Demo: floor massage with lateral tilts
Demo: floor massage for the back using the belly
*Video posts every Friday by 11:30am MDT
