When shopping for groceries I try to stay on the outside walls of the store…meaning I try to buy things that tend to spoil faster. Such as Veggies, Fruits, Meats, Eggs, Trail Mix and maybe a little Almond Milk when needed. By doing so I tend to stay away as much as possible from all the processed foods…but it does happen on occasion! If I do I try to hold out till the weekend or a designated day. It helps hold me accountable. Another thing I really try to stick with is portion size/control…I feel by watching my portions I can still enjoy some of the bad stuff every once in a while like potatoes and pastas. For the most part I’ve just cut out all pastas, starchy carbs, and definitely bread. Instead I opt for a lettuce wrap in place of bread for my burgers, lunch meat, or really anything sandwich like. When it comes to what I buy in terms of organic vs. non-organic, lets face it, in a perfect world I’d buy everything organic but lets face it, its darn expensive!! So I do my best and buy organic when I can but just buy good healthy things instead of the processed stuff. I also like to change it up and try different methods of eating/fasting to see what works best for me. A couple of my favorite ways are the Daniel Fast w/ a few added proteins and the paleo method. My motto if I have one would just be to eat healthy, watch how much I eat, and make sure I’m eating to sustain/maintain my activity level.
The process of a negative feedback loop in nature. I am sure we are all familiar with the concept by another description, you have a river and you remove the plants from the bank and so the river washes away the soil and permits more water to flow and wash away more plants, soil, etc. This is analogous to the pain/dysfunction cycle in the body. Something happens that we don’t fully understand and so we brace ourselves. In doing so we stop moving as much, and things become impeded, they hurt more. So the process continues until we reach a place one day where something snaps or we never return to fruitful movement. Then a more severe injury occurs one day when we are moving the simplest of objects.
When people ask me about the benefits of massage this is one of those things that is difficult to describe because positive change is occurring in every part and system in the body. It is a lot of small changes everywhere that make the experience. The therapist’s intention is much more than "fixing" someone. It is to guide them back through the dysfunction (that negative feedback) to establishing and understanding what they are experiencing. If someone is experiencing lateral knee pain, I would be remiss to simply work on them without them hearing something about how and why that pain is occurring.
The usage of myotherapy extends far back into our past. As the development of technology progresses so does the understanding of the effects and need for specificity of technique. Among the many prominent thinkers is the work offered by the now passed Ida Rolf. Now Dr. Rolf contributed a great deal to the field of knowledge in body work, examining things from her biochemical perspective and using a holistic eye to appreciate the many layers of transformation that occur in movement and in the context of a massage or structural session.
Massage does many things, too many to effectively list here. Today’s focus is on the changes occurring in the pliability of connective tissue in movement and massage.
Think back to time spent in your kitchen. Now, we have all made a good chicken broth, some of us have made a meat based stock. What differentiated the two is the presence of dense connective tissue, bones, etc. When reduced to its more basic components the function of each strata becomes more apparent. When you cook a stock then place it in the fridge over night something magical happens. The layers separate and several things form. Usually on top is a layer of greasy fat and other fatty compounds, then comes a translucent jelly. That jelly is the ground substance and the dissolved solids of the connective tissue. If you examine that jelly in your hands you will notice how smooth it is, how well it lubricates and how quickly when heated it returns to liquid.
There are some mechanical properties you can observe simply by playing with your food. These exist in vivo to a less transitory extreme. By that I mean they change but to a lesser or slower degree. As we exercise the dense connective tissue melts, literally changing physical state. The same thing happens in a "rolf" type massage (is occurs in other massage modalities but to a varying degree and not as specifically).
With enough heat the jelly base (hylauronic acid, water, solids) would dissociate and we are left with is a pliable and maleable substance that both maintains structure and lubricates. In the body through the pouches and tissues the fibers of the connective tissue help to segment and offer a more permanent structure. In the case of a stock on the stovetop, that complex straining mesh has been broken down and there is little to keep fluid from freely flowing.
Now, the connective tissue never becomes a proper liquid “en vivo,” it is more of a chemical colloid. In that changed state however, nutrients/oxygen can permeate what was formerly a largely solid mass – hylauronic acid, collagen, elastin, reticulin and to a smaller degree fibrin.
Since the pliable tissue is now freely moving; the force moving through the body gets transferred to solid masses or adhesion and congestion in the body. In the case of acute injury, this microscopic tug of war is contraindicated (discouraged) in the case of a chronic injury or dysfunction is it likely the best thing for it. Hence if you attend physical therapy they have you do exercises in the formerly injured area.
As we move we massage ourselves. As the joints move, relative pressures change, and muscles press on each other. The self massage is not occurring as specifically as a therapist would induce but some of the benefits cross over. In the case of the synovial joints where circulatory permeation is occurring to a lesser degree (hence the very white color) we depend on movement – in the case of a massage or actual exercise to migrate nutrients in and out of the joint.
As we cool down, we decrease the rate of activity to below the rate of recovery so we improve our state with each repetition. This allows the less desirable consequences of exercise to be reduced (eg post workout soreness) while we are still in this gelatinous state. As we cool down we begin to congeal, if we are drinking enough water, the water will become trapped in the different tissues of the body and reduce how solid or stiff the tissue will be.
A structural massage does not mandate pain, it is about overcoming the chemical bonds in the tissue and facilitating a relaxed neurological state. Less is more, it is about the quality of the contact. In many instances I hear from clients about how they were left sore and bruised – deep tissue massage is a basterdization of this kind of technique.
If I take my beef stock from the night before and microwave it, I only need the gel to melt. By heating up the stock for 20 minutes I only make the stock to hot to eat, I don’t make it any more of a liquid than heating it for 5. In fact frequently pain is something that encourages an antagonistic effect, when we experience pain we begin to brace to protect and rightfully so. Similarly to heating the stock, if your therapist is working on a congested area, they only need to increase pressure to overcome the pressure outside the cells (its osmosis, fluid flows to the lowest pressure area until pressure equalizes) at a certain point the channels on the cell wall through which fluid flows are maxed out, we can force any more fluid through those holes at a single moment without risking injury.
Dr. Rolf’s work was about overcoming the chemical bonds that impeded movement and posture in a very specific way. It was about encouraging fluid to migrate and “fuzz” to break up between the sliding surfaces of the body. In her work and certainly the education a structural integration therapist is given, the pressure is very specifically applied – we don’t overcome poor technique by simply mashing into the body harder.
If you take one thing away from this article let it be that there is no replacement for an understanding of the body, and that although each issue is unique – there are underlying principles that are still universal and there is hope. Also discomfort is ok in massage, pain is to be avoided. If you are shopping for a therapist for yourself and they are going to work on a painful area that is not currently injured it is a good litmus test if they can answer to you how and why that area is painful. If they can’t at least suggest cause, they probably don’t know enough to be taking on that responsibility.
– Frederick Preston LMT
