Chair Massage Techniques - Doing Safe Effective Massage Part 1

Chair Massage guru, Eric Brown, has developed eight guidelines for effective body use that he suggests you incorporate to reduce the wear and tear on your muscles. This is the first part of a four part series:

Principle 1: Keep your spine in a neutral alignment

The torso should be kept in an aligned position. The curves of the spine shouldn't be exaggerated or eliminated. By maintaining this position, there is a minimal amount of strain to the vertebral discs or the ligaments that support your spine. Because we oftentimes have sedentary lifestyles, we tend to lack the strength and body awareness that we need to stabilize the trunk in this neutral position.

For this reason you need to be positively conscious of maintaining the back in this alignment. This stabilization is critically essential and lets you to transfer your mass efficiently into the customer's body.

You should lunge when performing most of the massage techniques. If our trunk is aligned in a lunge position, you will notice that you are looking down at the floor. This is an unusual position. We elicit an orienting reflex that causes us to align our gaze to the horizon. So your normal tendency will be to lift up your gaze and bend your torso into a very upright position to see straight ahead. This pulls your spine out of an aligned position and causes hyperlordosis (excessive curving) in the lumbar spine. This makes it a lot more difficult to stabilize the lumbar spine and causes undue stress to the spinal joints.

It's imperative to battle this reflex and to preserve a very neutral alignment of the low back. Initially it will feel surprisingly uncomfortable. Interestingly enough though, as you direct your conscious awareness to your back you'll soon start to be conscious in a kinesthetic way why it makes sense. At the beginning it will take intense focus to keep this neutral positioning. But with time you'll being to feel more comfortable with the feeling of this position and it will gradually become very natural for you to maintain.

Below you'll find a simple exercise you can practice to develop a strong sense of stability in your torso in this neutral position.

Practice this exercise for an aligned spine...

With a previous career in dance, I've been exposed to different ways of thinking about the body and the way it moves through space. Dancers don't have a lot of technical knowledge about human anatomy so they are likely to talk about movement behaviors using imagery. One image they habitually use, no matter what they are doing, is the image of pushing your feet into the ground. Think about Newton's third law of motion: \"Every action has an opposite and equal reaction.\" The more they drive into the floor, the more their spine rises and lengthens.

For this exercise, simply stand still in one position with your feet shoulder width separated. As you remain quiet for a second, pay attention to the sensations through your feet, your legs and your back. Scan your body with your inner eyes. While you are standing there in a relaxed way, think of pressing into the floor with your feet. Think about making an effort to push the floor downwards. As you do this, be aware of what happens in your body. Recognize how your legs feel as though they become more firm while at the same time staying relaxed. Feel your pelvis move into an upright orientation so that it feels like a bowl that softly supports your abdominal contents. Observe how your back appears to lengthen without any work and how your body lengthens around a central axis.

Repeat this a number of times letting your body relax and then engaging your feet into the floor to really recognize that lengthening sensation.