The Way I Practice

Overview

When referring to my massage practice, I tend to break it down between sports massage and wellness massage. Sports massage is the clinical, goal-oriented side of my massage designed to solve a problem, where wellness massage is more about full-body treatment suited for relaxation and stress relief. Listed below are the specialties and modalities that I am trained in as a massage therapist. In any one session, I may use one or all of the listed modalities to fit your body’s needs the best.

Swedish Massage

This type of massage focuses on using two primary techniques to help relieve stress and improve full body function. These techniques are referred to as effleurage and petrissage. Effleurage focuses on smooth, gliding movements to warm tissue where petrissage focuses on using pressure to help relieve muscle tension.

Deep Tissue Massage

As the name implies, this style of massage focuses similarly to Swedish massage’s technique of petrissage to work deep into muscles and help ease tension. This technique also can utilize cross-fiber frictioning to help reduce muscle adhesions and bring new blood (and thus, nutrients and oxygen) to the tissue.

Trigger Point Therapy

At its core, a trigger point is a band of muscle within the larger muscle belly that links up with itself and then will not relax when the rest of the muscle does. They’re often also referred to as “knots”. To relieve trigger points, there three frequent techniques: ischemic compression, muscle stripping, and reciprocal inhibition. Ischemic compression is about using pressure to deprive the muscle of oxygen until runs out of energy and releases. Muscle stripping is about gliding along the muscle fibers with moderate speed and pressure to help the trigger point resolve. Lastly, reciprocal inhibition can be used by using the opposing (antagonist) muscle at moderate force to convince the affected (agonist) muscle that it, too, can let go.