We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Nothing To Bring You An Aromatherapy Report

A while ago, as reported on this very blog, I bought a bunch of single note essential oils to mix with lotions, put in baths, and do other aromatherapy-ish sorts of things with, and tonight I found a wonderful combination of oils that actually does feel therapeutic.

I put six drops each of clary sage and bergamot into a warm Epsom salt bath after three particularly grueling days at work, and the result was amazing.

Clary sage is rather medicinal smelling, sort of like tea tree only not as sweet, and bergamot is citrusy and strong, but doesn’t smell at all like any other citrus, and is not as overpowering as orange or lime, or as cliché, come to that.

So the bergamot remained beneath the clary sage, though it was not flattened by it, but rather the citrus note buoyed and magnified the sage while distracting from the sage’s medicine-y texture, and the result truly was quite therapeutic – most refreshing and invigorating, while giving a sense of overall well being.

It was like going to the doctor and getting good news, or at least not getting any of the other sort, and at the same time noticing that the doctor is kind of cute, and don’t those scrubs hug her fulsome curves nicely? Why yes, I believe they do, and I wonder if she has a regular massage therapist. I should ask. 

That is all.

Mark out. 

Friday the What-th?

According to my Dave Barry calendar, today, Sept. 21, is UN International Day of Peace. 

So not that it hasn’t already for the past few weeks, but because of this happy coincidence we can be certain that this will be the day the spit will hit the fan all over the globe, because that’s how these things work. 

 

That is all.

Mark out. 

So, If Al Franken Is A Politician …

I know I promised to air no political rants here, and hopefully I can keep that promise … as in, no rants. But massage therapy can be very tiresome if that’s all one does, and today I’m really tired of it, so here is a short bit that I hope falls far short of a rant. 

Anyhow, someone asked me if Senator Al, one of the funniest guys to ever appear on Saturday Night Live when the show was still funny, still remembers the ancientest of political jibes –

How can you tell a politician is lying? See if his lips are moving.

My advice to Senator Al is to keep your mouth shut at all times. You have become the people our parents warned us against, and we’re watching you, buddy.  

However and but, Al is a Strict Constructionist as far as Petitioning the Government for Redress of Grievances. He has a whole shopping list of petitions out there, for all sorts of worthy, absolutely Blue State causes. Just Google his name and ‘petition.’  

And here is a corker of a petition, so click the following link. 

Take Elections Out of the Hands of Greedheads!

Okay, that’s not what it’s called but that’s my read on the ability of multi-gazillionaires to inundate the airwaves and press outlets with mega-million-dollars’ worth of advertising intended to swing elections their own way. And the Extreme Court says that’s quite all right.

And in this case “right” is the pivotal word in the court’s decision. These are not ‘citizens united,’ these are fabulously well to do megalomaniacs united to make sure sensibility and fair play never prevail in our elections, national or otherwise. 

Squelch the jerks. Sign the petition.

That is all.

Mark out. 

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

  If Senator Al Franken wants to write a followup to his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them … 

 He can just call it Congressman Paul Ryan. 

Yard Work Blues

Spring is early this year. Well, in fact there has not been much of a winter in North America, especially around here. Even in Kansas the lilacs bloomed a month early, so I am told, and last week the temperature in Flint, Michigan was warmer than Pensacola.

Which means that my clients have been extra industrious not only with spring cleaning, but with yard work, and I lost count of the strained low backs, sore shoulders, achy thighs, and stiff necks I have dealt with over the past couple of weeks as folks get back into the swing of caring for lawns and gardens.

I used to do that ages ago, care for a lawn, in southern California, and I did use different muscles to do that, or at least used muscles in different ways, than for anything else I ever did. So I can empathize with hedge-clipper wrist syndrome, and weed-pulling crouch thigh complaint, and reaching too high to saw down that tree limb hyperextension of the shoulder ouchiness.

Only now I know what to do about these issues in my clients because they resemble so many other muscular situations I treat routinely, and I saw a multitude of them over the past couple of weeks.

Of course Epsom salts baths and massage therapy work wonders on underused muscles that suddenly become overused muscles, but another great thing for those yard work aches and pains is to treat your gardening chores as a workout, which is really what they amount to.

Stretch before AND after you weed, and seed, and mow, and mulch, and schlep around that 15-pound edge trimmer, the leaf blower, and the electric hedge clippers that you haven’t picked up since last September.

Stretching will help move the lactic acid out of overworked muscles. That’s the stuff that builds up in the muscle tissue and causes the delayed aches and even cramps that often don’t manifest until the next day. Frequent rest breaks, and of course constant rehydration will help as well – get a big water bottle and keep drinking from it. Don’t wait until you get thirsty to drink, because by then you are already dehydrated.

And one last thing, all you weekend garden warriors – cover up! If it’s too hot for long trousers and long sleeves, at least use a good sunblock, SPF30 or better, everywhere your skin is exposed. And wear a hat, one that shades your neck. If you don’t have one, get one.

What you never want to do is come see me with sunburnt skin where I need to work on you, because I won’t do it.

But do come see me when you can, and I will sort out your muscle issues, and get you ready to go do it again next weekend.

That is all.

Mark out. 

salt baths, self massage, all that stuff

Put It On Ice

What’s the first thing you do when you get hurt? When you twist your ankle, bonk your head, pick up a big box the wrong way and wrench your back? I mean, what’s the first thing you do after you say a whole bunch of words you really hope Mom didn’t hear?

You assess the damage, of course, usually by touching the injured area, tentatively at first, and then gently rubbing it. That helps, first in making sure nothing is broken besides your dignity, and then also to assist the movement of blood and lymph into the area by impromptu massage.

After that you will want to do something that really helps, and that’s to ice the injury. Unless there is blood flowing from the site like the Trevi fountain, the most effective first aid for any injury is to seriously chill it out.

Prolonged application of subfreezing cold to human tissue immediately causes vasoconstriction, the shrinking of blood vessels, which means less blood flowing to the site. After 9 to 16 minutes, that effect is reversed, and there follows 4 to 6 minutes of vasodilation, bringing new blood to the site and pushing the cold blood out, in the body’s attempt to warm the affected area. After that, if the cold persists, vasoconstriction occurs once more, followed by another episode of vasodilation. This slow but strong pumping action, called the hunting response, not only brings needed oxygen, platelets, and other reconstructive materials to the injury site, but carries away damaged cells and other waste and toxins caused by the trauma. In addition, the cold will shut down nerves, desensitizing the area and reducing pain signals to the brain.

However, you don’t want to overdo it, because ice will also freeze tissues with prolonged exposure, so no more than 20 minutes continuous use is ever recommended.

You don’t need a massage therapist to put an ice pack on you, though I have put ice on clients who came in with recent injuries, or simply with spasmodic twitch that I could not reduce any other way, and there is something called ice massage that looks quite interesting but that I never have done.

On the other hand, I could be the cause of your needing ice, if for instance you come to see me with your back so jacked up that I have to jam my elbow an inch deep in your lower erector just beneath the last rib in order to quell a particularly stubborn trigger point, which is something I had to inflict on a guy last night.

What I do never is intended to hurt or harm, but sometimes I have to break a few muscle spindles in order to make a smooth, non-clenching-like-a-fist muscle omelet. So if I do have to go deep, I will always tell a client to use ice on the area later if it hurts.

And of course trauma and that mean old massage therapist aren’t the only causes of injury that can use cold therapy. If you overdo it at the gym, not necessarily pulling or spraining anything, but just an ache down to the bones from overuse, I would treat that as an injury and ice it as well.

Sometimes I go overboard myself, working too deep for too long on someone, and wind up with aching fingers, so you might see me in the break room, ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth clutched in both hands.

Try not to laugh, okay?

That is all.

Mark out.

Which Is Worse? Left Or Right?

No, this is not a political rant, and I promise to spare you any of those, no matter how stupid politicians act. It’s about the difference between left- and right-handed individuals, from a massage therapist’s point of view.

One thing I have noticed, amongst the myriad things I have noticed in the past couple of years studying the human body up close and personal, is that most people are right handed.

Okay, that isn’t really what I noticed in the past couple of years. What I did notice is that most people, and by most I mean 99.9% of my clients, have knots and trigger points and quite a lot of hypertonic muscles between their scapulae, their shoulder blades, because that’s where they store their stress, whether left or right handed.

You get stress in your neck moving your head, no matter what you do – even when asleep – and that stress tugs on the muscles between the shoulders.

You get stress doing whatever you do with your hands and arms all day – driving, typing, hammering nails, drawing mustaches on pictures of models in magazines, whatever it is you use your arms and hands for, and that stress all winds up in the middle of your back, between your shoulder blades, because your shoulder muscles move every time your arms and hands move.

And then also, because those big, fat erector muscles that run all the way from the base of your skull to the base of your spine pass right between your shoulder blades, you get all the pulling and the stress from below when you move your hips and legs.

This is why I usually spend a great deal of my time in any massage working between and around the shoulders. That’s where most of the body’s stress is, and where the client will feel the most relief when I squash knots, release trigger points, and unclench hypertonic muscles.

But to return to my main point, one might think that there would be more knots and kinks and trigger points and all that stuff on the right side of the spine in right handed people, because that’s where most of the right handed person’s activity is.

By now you have figured out that this is NOT the case, otherwise I wouldn’t have any startling revelation to reveal. No, fellow grasshoppers, most right handed people are significantly more jacked up (that’s a technical LMT term, by the way) on the left side, in the rhomboids, trapezius, often the teres minor, sometimes the deltoid, and even the erectors, often down as far as the sacrum.

Nearly everyone I work on has active trigger points along the medial edges of the scapula, where the rhomboids attach. Almost invariably these are more active and often more numerous on the left than the right, in right handed clients. The rhomboids themselves usually are stiffer and more hypertonic, and often even ischemic.

For a long time I explained this phenomenon to myself and sometimes to clients as some kind of compensation mechanism – the weaker left side trying so hard to keep up with the stronger right, that the muscles became overworked.

Now I have a better explanation, or at least an alternative one. I think it’s a matter of inactivity rather than overactivity. When a right handed person reaches for something he usually uses his right hand and arm rather than the left. Over time this preference for one motion over another makes the left shoulder area significantly less active than the right.

With fewer opportunities to stretch, the rhomboids especially become partially ischemic, that is, there is less blood flow, less oxygen and nutrients, and more tendency to become stiff, increasing the probability of active trigger points developing.

The reverse is not necessarily the case with lefties, because most left handed people have to be somewhat ambidextrous to get along in a right-handed world. Some even were encouraged, by which I mean forced in one case I know personally, during childhood to become right rather than left handed. The result is that most left handed clients I work on don’t have this issue. If they are jacked up, they are jacked up equally.

I have found that the same is true in those who exercise regularly and intensely. With a good exercise program, both sides of the body are worked more or less equally, so this phenomenon doesn’t occur as often.

So my suggestion to right-handed folks is to stretch more. Well, all right, my suggestion to everyone is to stretch more. Get both arms above your head, lean against a wall, hang from the monkey bars at the park, whatever you feel like, just to get the rhomboids on both sides tugged and stretched more often.

And take Epsom salt baths.

And come see me for a massage anyway.

Couldn’t hurt.

That is all.

Mark out.