Save Your Shoulders - Part 2: Keeping Your Shoulders Relaxed While You’re Massaging

Incorporating good bodyuse practices(described in the previous article) will enable you to generate power from your legs and trunk so that you can work most effectively with the least effort. The role of your shoulders is to transmit this power from your trunk to your arms, while staying relatively relaxed throughout your body.

Of course you need to engage your shoulder muscles to some extent to transmit this power from your trunk. But it’s important to avoid relying on them to create the power for your massage techniques, which can lead to overusing, fatiguing and straining them. Bear in mind that it’s the slow accumulation of fatigue and strain, over time, from overworking your shoulders in many massage sessions that can cause problems.

Saving your upper trapezius 

Massage practitioners can develop fatigue, stiffness or soreness in the top of the shoulders (upper trapezius) through regularly tensing and overusing their shoulders.

Common problems

Common problems to AVOID because they will force you to overuse your upper trapezius are:

• tensing your shoulders to deliver pressure, instead of leaning forward to use your bodyweight
  
  
• trying to apply more pressure than you can comfortably deliver - you’ll be tensing up your shoulders if you attempt to apply more pressure than your bodyweight can provide (it’s important to refer on clients for whom you can't deliver sufficient pressure without straining)
  
  
• having the massage table too high - if the table is too high, you can’t use your bodyweight for power and you will be forced to rely on your shoulder muscles
  
  
• standing still and just relying on ‘shoulder muscle power’, which was the subject of the previous article in the series.
  

Keeping your upper trapezius relaxed

Try to regularly monitor your shoulders and remind yourself to relax them and to use your body well so that you can keep them relaxed.

It’s good to do exercises that mobilise your shoulders and keep them flexible in your warm-ups before massage sessions, and to relax them after sessions. One of the simplest ways of doing this is making shoulder circles.

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

Recap on Part 1: Effective body use to protect your shoulders.
Continue reading 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.