Save Your Shoulders - Part 1: Good Body Use For Massage Therapists To Protect Your Shoulders

In massage, applying pressure places the highest demand on your body. 

Newcomers to the massage profession often stand still when massaging and rely solely on their upper body strength to generate power - tensing their shoulders to deliver pressure. This puts strain on their shoulders and makes the massage more stilted and less powerful.

Bear in mind that doing 1 massage (or even 10) in this way won’t fatigue or strain your shoulders - it’s the slow, cumulative effect over many massages(often outside of conscious awareness) that can take a toll on the practitioner’s body. If you’ve got a big, strong build, you may be able to maintain your career working in this way.

But, for most of us with average or small builds, just relying on our shoulder muscles won’t be enough to sustain our careers - it’s crucial to involve your whole body to save your shoulders.It's also crucial to pace yourself, look after your wrists, and protect your thumbs.

This is the first of three related articles focused on looking after your shoulders in massage.

The three themes are:

• Using your body well to take pressure off your shoulders (this article)
• Keeping your shoulders relaxed (upper trapezius)
• Not overusing your rotator cuff muscles or your deltoid (by standing still and just pushing with your arms).

Using your whole body and the role of your shoulders

It’s important to use your whole body to support your working tools most effectively, with the least amount of strain, rather than relying on your shoulder muscles for power.

So the aim is to generate power from your legs and hips and transmit it up through your trunk. 

Then you engage your shoulder muscles to transmit this power through to your arms - but DON’T rely on them to generate the power.

Two important aspects of this are:

• Leaning forward to apply pressure - in both stationary and sliding strokes (leaning your whole body, not hunching over) - as you would for pushing a heavy object (e.g. pushing a car). 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• And swaying your body to deliver the power and fluidity of sliding strokes.
  
  
  
  

If using your body in this way is unfamiliar, it takes time and practice to consolidate in your massage sessions.

However, it’s important to develop this so that how you use your body becomes an instinctive, integral part of delivering massage techniques that involve pressure.

This article is adapted from “Foundations of Hands Free Massage” by Darien Pritchard (to be published later this year).

Continue reading part 2 of our 'Saving your shoulders' series: Keeping your shoulders relaxed while you’re massaging.

Part 3: Protecting your rotator cuff muscles.

About the Authors

Darien Pritchard from Dynamic Massage and Hands Free Massage Training, has been a massage trainer since 1982, and has served on the General Council for Massage Therapy (UK). He wrote the career-maintenance book Dynamic Bodyuse for Effective Strain-Free Massage (2008), and the student text Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology for Massage (2nd ed, 2023). For four decades, Darien has pioneered a focus on how massage practitioners can protect their hands and body whilst using them most effectively, including developing the original Hands Free Massage training 25 years ago - the skilful, sensitive use of the forearm and elbow to save the hands.

Leora Sharp from Hands Free Massage Training, has been a massage practitioner since 2008 and very early on in her career, realised the importance of needing to work as Hands Free as possible. To that end, in 2009 she trained with Darien and was so blown away with Hands Free Massage, that she offered to assist him on his 8 Day Advanced training. Her role slowly transformed into co-teacher and she then started teaching solo in 2016. She is continually bowled over how amazing HFM is and the benefits it brings to practitioners to sustain their careers. Alongside teaching HFM, Leora has a private practice at Neal’s Yard in Bath and designs websites for complementary health professionals.