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No Hands
For the last three-and-a-half years she has
been using the No Hands technique, developed by a Yorkshire therapist to reduce
injuries sustained by masseurs. A Cambridge University modern languages
graduate, 47-year-old Anne at one time wanted to be a wine buyer but changed her
ideas when she discovered conventional massage after moving to California in
1980. She soon trained up for her first certificate, and has been practicing
full-time since the mid-1980s when she moved to Bracknell with her husband Neal
and two children.
Anne said: "When I read about it I thought 'I
want to carry on massaging until I'm 80, so I want to prevent myself getting
injured'. It is different, but I think a lot of the differences are positive as
the forearms feel much softer than hands. Once you start having massage with the
forearms, you do not want to go back to hands because it is much softer and more
contact. I do use my elbows, but not in a painful way. I also use my shoulder
sometimes and my head sometimes. Instead of being restrictive, it opens up and
makes it much more creative somehow. I remember on my first course there were
several people who either had stopped massaging, or were about to because they
had painful wrists and painful hands. I think people only scoff at it if they
haven't experienced it."
The massage was fantastic, especially because
Anne managed to fit a full body massage into a 30-minute session because arms
cover a larger surface area.
It was particularly relaxing and distressing
when Anne clamped her arms around each of my arms, massaged my legs and
unknotted my back with her arms, shoulder and head. I told her I had a painful
lower back and tense neck and shoulders, so she concentrated particularly on
these areas.
She said: "When someone comes to me I
tailor-make the massage in terms of pressure, length, pace or styles. In all the
years I have studied different massage techniques, No Hands massage was the
thing that radically changed my whole approach to it."
She said the idea was to listen to what the
client wants: "The thing about No Hands is to save your hands for when you do
need to use them. If I am causing so much pain that the person is tensing up
against me then I'm negating the effect of the massage."
A member of the International Guild of
Professional Practitioners and of the On Site Massage Association, Anne looks
after around 200 clients, from people wanting a relaxing massage to sporting
professionals and disabled pensioners. She also teaches parents to massage their
babies.
Deep muscle therapy tools allow both patient and care givers
to apply the same kind of pressure to painful muscles as a regular part of
everyday self-care. Our tools can effectively supplement professional
therapeutic care for relieving muscular pain, stiffness and dysfunction
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