Larry Heisler

Featured Article 
  A Grand-Master Shares Pearls of Massage Wisdom!
by Larry Heisler, M.A., LMT

 "Rigor mortise sets in way before you die."    

I have been doing massage full time for 41 years.   
I have performed over 50,000 massage therapy sessions and my first 8,000 were in traditional barefoot shiatsu. 
My teachers were the original macrobiotic masters; Michio Kushi, Masahiro Oki, Serena Silva, Annemarie Colbin and Shizuko Yamamoto. My soft tissue massage mentors were Osteopath extraordinaire 
Dr. Wally Burnstein, D.O. and  N.J. Swedish massage legend, Ingeborg Schlobohm, RMT, C.I. 
 I founded and direct the oldest running massage school in New Jersey.
My National AMTA number is 1426.   
My spiritual mentor was the meditation and healing master Hilda Charlton. I went to her classes three nights a week for twelve years.
Since 1975, I have taught 3,500 meditation classes.  

 Here's a couple things I learned along the way.

As we get older our muscles get harder, shorter and colder, eventually settling into our body pattern and determining how we move in space the remainder of our lives. Can you say frozen in time? Your discomfort, your stiffness and inflexibility is normal, we all get that. That's what aging is. You've might have heard me say one of my famous lines, "Rigor mortise sets in way before you die." It took you years to get hard and tight. Just look in the mirror. Does your head tilt to one side? Is one shoulder higher than the other? Do your feet point outward and the heel of your shoes wear out on one side? Did the "S" curve of your spine become a "C"? Do your shoulders or neck jut forward? Does your pelvis tilt down on an angle? This happens to all of us, it's not just you. In Oriental medicine, the muscular stiffness and inflexibility of aging, along with the associative pain and the overall degenerative process is believed to be directly influenced by our lifestyle choices and specifically our nutritional excesses. So if you consume more than your body can burn or more than your internal organs can manage, these excesses will affect how you move, express yourself and how you age. Essentially diseases of excess are rich people's problems. You might not recognize the affluence you are living with because that is all you have ever known but there is a reason why Americans are so obese and have so many degenerative conditions. 
Think about it...     

Excess fat= heart, liver and respiratory disease
Excess protein= kidney disease
Excess sugar= diabetes 
Excess salt= strokes 
Excess environmental exposure (chemical, hormone, pesticide, radiation) = cancer
Excess in general= imbalance, mental health problems, accidents, suicide

 

After working on thousands of athletes I've come to understand that a healthy musculature is soft and pliable. The only time an athlete should have a hard body is when they are flexing or competing. So hardness is aging that is setting in and that's my first objective when beginning a session. BREAK UP THE HARDNESS. Your patients body will tell you what is needed and even where to concentrate, just find the hard, cold, inflexible areas. That's usually where the problems stem from. If your patient always has a cold butt that might be an indication that something is brewing. Consider the butt is the home of the reproductive organs. Many years of poor circulation in that region might be the precursor to a more serious complaint many years down the road. According to the National Women's Health Information Center, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, one of every three women in America have a hysterectomy by the age of sixty. My teachers have always said the stagnation and cold in the reproductive organs were caused by excessive consumption of fat specifically dairy and especially cheese. Give it some thought.    

If you are still doing the massage you learned by rote in school, you are not a therapist yet, just a practitioner. You can use your original format as a template but everyone's body is completely different and requires personalized attention. Soft tissue pain (even ticklishness) can indicate blockage and imbalance especially in the acupuncture energetic system.When you are addressing these areas start by desensitizing. A good massage never hurts. Think of the body as an onion skin that you are peeling layer by layer. So the rule is, start at the point of their muscles resistance. When you press on the point gradually, that's the moment the muscle repels your touch. That means you are starting on the light side and gradually bringing them along to deeper work. Once you've stripped down the muscular hardness and addressed the inflexible cold zones, then you can clear the trigger points, work the adhesion's and scar tissuewith cross fiber work, open up the energetic system and then elongate those areas with some good myofascial stretching. Bonnie Prudden, one of the gals that originated trigger point therapy along with her boss Dr. Janet Travell, taught the use of triggerpoints and stretching for every pain condition. In the 1980's, the late Bob King, President of the national AMTA, to circumvent soreness after a trigger point session taught the use of hydroculator steam packs. I have found that approach to be a God-send. Either way you'll be doing good work.    

This approach boosts your bodies healing capabilities by significantly increasing your internal oxygen storehouse.    

Massage alkalizes the body.    

An alkaline body provides optimal circulation. When Dr. Nathan Pritikin was in residence at the Mayo Clinic in the early 1980's he was curing folks of what was considered up to that time historically incurable conditions with his famous plant based, complex carbohydrate diet. When they asked the great doctor how was it possible that after only six months' on his diet wheel chair patients that initially could only walk 100 feet were walking or jogging six to ten miles a day, Dr. Pritikin said, when you eat a plant based diet you dramatically increase the oxygen levels of the body and rapid healing occurs. 

Well isn't that what we as massage therapists do as well? Massage dramatically increases circulation!

 

NOBODY addresses soft tissue complaints as well as a massage therapist! Soft tissue complaints require soft tissue solutions! Massage therapists are soft tissue experts and we break up hardness, slow down aging, speed up healing, help encourage the release of endorphin's and boost immune function. In the long run, we keep folks looking and feeling younger. It doesn't happen overnight but it does happen, just ask Bob Hope, Rose Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth. All three emphatically said massage is the secret to longevity. If you are a massage therapist and I know this newsletter goes out to over one thousand of you, think differently about what you do. You are Ponce De Leon; you make a significant difference. It's time to change the way you think about yourself and your chosen profession; you have devoted your lives to healing. That alone should get you into heaven...