TEA-TOWELS AND TAILORING - exploring the fabric of our body with massage
Ian Tennant

I’m often intrigued by the way clients describe what it feels like to receive a massage.  The sensation felt when working slowly up from the heel along the deep muscle fibres towards the knee, was likened by one lady to squeezing toothpaste out of tube.  Another said her back felt “all warm and squidgy, like porridge” after her treatment – rather than the “brittle, grey plastic” that was lodged in her shoulder blades beforehand. Yet, it was the similarity to “ironing creases out of a tea-towel” which recently got me thinking about the role of functional, flowing movement during therapy in helping clients fully recover.

When treating clients with standard techniques, perhaps lying still and face down on a massage couch - the ‘tea-towel’ comparison ideally describes the local smoothing effect of massage on a specific part of their body. Yet a whole person is much more interesting than a flat, piece of cloth that spends half it’s life in a kitchen drawer!  As soon as they jump off the couch, bodies twist and stretch using complex patterns of movement that require a phenomenal amount of muscle memory and whole-body coordination in three dimensions.  One of the hardest jobs for a therapist is to make sure that the one-hour’s worth of ‘ironing’ done on the couch is integrated by the client into the twenty-three hours of living off the couch in the real world, and that they avoid resorting to damaging patterns of muscle recruitment.

So, in keeping with the latest cutting edge research on fascia (the connective tissue of ‘fabric’ of our body) my New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to upgrade the tea-towel analogy and think about the fabric of our bodies more like a fashion designer or tailor would when designing a ball gown: appreciating the role that the properties of cloth  – such as drape and absorbency – play in the overall performance of the garment, or in our case the performance of the client’s body.  By introducing stretch and dance-like movements in three dimensions into massage treatments we can go further than just releasing tension and really restore the body to its natural state of grace and elegance.