UpClose & Personal - Mike McGillicuddy

Over the years I have practiced Sports Massage I have come to realize how important certain skills are to achieving excellent results. One of those skills is certainly the development of very precise and sensitive palpation skills.

As a teacher of musculoskeletal anatomy, students spend hours just learning the names, origins, insertions and actions of the common muscles massaged in a relaxation type massage. It is always fun to see a student actually feel for the first time the muscles they have been studying. It is like watching a light being turned on inside them. The next step is trying to get them to feel the borders of the muscles and then the direction of the fibers within the muscles.

Years ago I took a sports massage workshop with Jack Meagher. He had written a book called sports massage in which he described sports massage techniques and the texture of healthy and injured muscles. I had read the book before attending his workshop but the book did not make sense to me. After being in the workshop with Jack and watching him work and having him take your hand to position it so you could feel exactly what he was talking about the light turned on for me.

Sometimes I think what is missing in our profession is the vocabulary that describes the texture of tissue. We should be able to describe what healthy tissue feels like and what unhealthy tissue feels like.

Jack described healthy tissue as simply feeling smooth and consistent. He also described unhealthy tissue as feeling thick, like piano strings or spongy. When muscle feels thick I consider it to be hyper tonic. When muscle feels like piano strings I consider it to have a few fibers within the muscle that are staying in constant contraction. When muscles feel spongy I consider them to be inflamed. Each one of these muscle problems requires different sports massage techniques to resolve the problem. A highly skilled Sports Massage educator should be able to teach a student how to palpate for and treat these types of muscular problems.

How do you get to the point where you can feel each type of muscular
problem?

It usually requires working on numerous people for comparative assessment experience. Secondly I usually ask a student to close their eyes while applying a specific technique slowly to become more focused on what the tissue feels like. After practicing the techniques this way for a while I believe the sports massage therapist begins to "see" with their fingers. The third component in increasing palpation literacy is asking the athlete for feedback on how the tissue feels.

The sports massage therapist that has developed very sensitive palpation literacy is often asked how do your hands know just exactly where to go. The athlete develops a great deal of trust in this type of therapist because they know from their experience that the therapist knows what they are doing.

Palpation literacy is not the only skill that is required to provide effective treatments but it sure is one I think should be high on the priority list.

I hope this information has been helpful to you. Take care and I hope you enjoy being a part of the Massage Therapy Profession.

SpiritMcg@aol.com