Get ready for this years Barefoot Massage Open Challenge! This year’s topic for the “Open” is on common physical imbalances of Barefoot Massage Therapists that could result in injury. Our instructors have been talking behind the scenes A LOT about all the things that make up “body mechanics“… things like your alignment while working, as well as what movement possibilities and what common restrictions Barefoot Massage Therapists are working around. Together, we’re compiling tips and tricks, videos, exercises and food for thought content for everyone that will help your body be ready and pain free to give a long career full of barefoot massage sessions!
Make sure to subscribe to our new SubStack, which works like a blog and newsletter in one! As we post new content, it’ll show up in your inbox, too! That’s where the challenge will be posted.
We haven’t been able to consistently post an actual ANNUAL challenge, because, well, life. It all started in 2018 and coincided with the CrossFit Open – just something for Barefoot Massage Therapists to push themselves through. We’ve had 3 so far, and this will be our 4th! The goal all along with these challenges has been for you to get out of your box and try something NEW. Our main focus when teaching FasciAshi is for you to make the techniques effective because you are educated on the theory and feel the ease of its application flow through your body. Your inner wisdom shines through when you are able to contemplate WHY or HOW your massage strokes work. When that is put into action in the most physically efficient and effective way possible for your body, you can see progress in yourself, your clients, and you’ll have a seriously better chance of staying in this profession longer.
We’ve got fresh content coming weekly starting March 8th, 2024 – but in the meantime, did you know that we’ve also got an archive of challenges from previous years?! You can dive into them for the 1st time, or the 10th!
Here’s a list of past years’ Barefoot Massage Open Challenges:
This was a 3-month long, content creating challenge that pushed you to create NEW content on specific topics that educated YOUR community: Jump in on that challenge here – it was only 1 blog post to pull you through the entire project >>>
This was an ambitious 2x/week 5-week challenge that had you moving and massaging in ways to create more physical endurance and mindfulness in your sessions. Jump in on any of the weeks here>>>
This was our first challenge that pushed you out of the routine and encouraged you to work more creatively than robotically. Try these challenges out and see how it changes your approach.
Resources for you to use to educate your immediate circles on the benefits of Massage AND ways to help YOU be more aware within your Barefoot Massage sessions.
First off, welcome to this years National Massage Therapy Awareness Week! This long holiday is our professions chance to spend an ENTIRE DEDICATED WEEK to promote the health benefits of massage therapy and their practices.
If you need some facts to share with your local community, follow these links for great resources to pull from:
Our tips to tune into your own awareness while giving a Barefoot Massage session.
Pulling from the resources listed above, we noticed that according to the national consumer survey from the AMTA, ๐๐ค๐ฃ๐จ๐ช๐ข๐๐ง๐จ ๐๐๐ซ๐ ๐ฆ๐ช๐๐๐ ๐ก๐ฎ ๐ก๐๐๐ง๐ฃ๐๐ ๐ฉ๐๐ ๐ซ๐๐ก๐ช๐ & ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ฎ ๐ค๐ ๐ข๐๐จ๐จ๐๐๐ ๐ฉ๐๐๐ง๐๐ฅ๐ฎ ๐๐จ ๐๐ฃ ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐ค๐ง๐ฉ๐๐ฃ๐ฉ ๐๐ฅ๐ฅ๐ง๐ค๐๐๐ ๐๐ค๐ง ๐๐๐๐ก๐ฉ๐ & ๐ข๐๐๐๐๐๐ก ๐๐ค๐ฃ๐๐๐ฉ๐๐ค๐ฃ๐จ. It’s important to recognize here that a well-informed Barefoot Massage COULD be perfect for many elements of injury treatment & pain management – depending on the person & situation …both client & therapist.โฃ
This doesn’t just automatically happen when you put a foot on someone. ๐ช๐ต๐ & ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ผ strategically ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐น๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ธ ๐บ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ผ๐๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐น๐ฎ๐๐๐ฒ๐. FasciAshi is Myofascial, Neuromuscular & Stretch Therapy techniques meant to be individually sequenced as needed for each person underfoot. No two appointments are the same. The more you learn, the more barefoot technique vocabulary & reasoning skills you’ll have to customize for these clients: it just needs to be put into practice to elevate the outcomes.
SO how can you pull details out of your massage education resources from the Center for Barefoot Massage and work with more attention on your intention?
If you’ve attended any of our Center for Barefoot Massage classes already, review your manuals & check out some of the “Why’s” & the anatomical focus points to help pick strokes that work for each client individually this week. Don’t do every stroke you’ve ever learned: just do the ones they “knead!” Next, โฃcheck into the mindfulness lists from our Intermediate, ROM and Advanced class manuals to hone in on the intent of your stroke as needed for the person.
Here’s an example for you to try this week in practice:
How can you make your movements/strokes more effortless on your body, but still have the same intent and focus of intensity and effectiveness for your client? Now, this isn’t an excuse to massage lazily: we are asking you to reevaluate all the physical effort you are putting into each stroke, and check yourself to see if it’s needed.
Can you relax your grip on the bar?
Can your foot on the table be aimed in better alignment with it’s same side knee and hip in a way to better distribute pressure through the working foot?
Are you moving with breath – and how are your movements impacting the breath of you and your client?
Can you just give it weight, and wait?
โฃThere you go!
Take that much of a new perspective to try this week in your massage appointments: our experience has shown that it definitely helps!
Hi, I’m Jeni Spring feeling the need to chime in here about the Ashi-Strap! Have you seen something dangling from Ashiatsu Bars in pictures across the internet? Is someone you follow online leaning or sitting in a strap of some kind while massaging with their feet?
I started that trend. You’re welcome! Now the strap is integral to the Myofascial Ashiatsu technique taught at the Center for Barefoot Massage.
When we say that we are “anatomy based”, it’s not JUST that classes from the Center for Barefoot Massage will focus on your palpation skills, or that each stroke we teach has an intention aimed to achieve specific structural goals: it’s also because our instructors focus on making Barefoot Massage work for YOUR anatomy, so that you can specialize based on YOUR strengths.
โThe definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.โ
The Center for Barefoot Massage opened in February 2017, but the technique was in creation long before that. While teaching for the original westernized Ashiatsu Barefoot Massage continuing education company, our founders, Jeni Spring and Mary-Claire Fredette, saw that 22 years of the same routine of strokes wasn’t doing any of us any favors.
Mary-Claire saw it in herself: although teaching a routine for such a stylized technique does really help create consistency in the massage approach, allowing clients the ability to know what to expect when they got that type of massage anywhere across the nation – the predictability was causing mental burnout.
Jeni had been seeing it already for years in her team of Barefoot Massage Therapists that worked with her at the nation’s first “all Barefoot” specialty clinic, Heeling Sole… The same stroke didn’t work for all the folks underfoot and caused repetitive strain injury on the LMTs when they tried to do that routine of strokes all day, every day.
We’ve found barefoot massage at high-end resorts, backstage at concerts, on the finish line of marathons, in medical clinics, at military bases across the world. They are on the beach at surfing competitions, onsite with professional sports teams and dance companies, and in private practices that work on a range of clientele. Ashiatsu has popped up with traveling Renaissance Faires, motorcycle rallies, art-walks, yoga festivals and even inside refurbished busses. We’ve even had clients whose lives have been changed by receiving barefoot massage so much that they went to massage school and got licensed just so that they could come back and learn our barefoot work. Many people have built their first, second, third and even ninth careers around that magic.
How can you build your dream job?
Just like what you learned in massage school is only the beginning, the material presented in any single barefoot massage class cannot address the infinite possibility of niches for massage. Massage publications show us how traditional hands-on massage therapists have successfully narrowed down to specialize in interesting demographics, modalities or tissue-issues. Barefoot Massage therapists can do that too! The Center for Barefoot Massage aims to push the growth of myofascial ashiatsu. We want LMT’s to expand into any market, specialize in barefoot massage, and work with their tool of choice: their feet!
Beyond training in our live classes, Certification is a big part of becoming a barefoot massage specialist. We have another page with that information available here, so I won’t talk much about that self-study process in today’s blog post ๐
We often get asked “Can I do a full massage after just one class?”ย
Of course you can, but you can do a much better and more informed massage session if you keep training.ย
Your 1st step
Take the FasciAshi Fundamentals course. That class alone will give you the information and tools to provide a massage that could be interpreted in a few ways. Use it to create a slow, focused myofascial session, and/or as a relaxing blissed-out deep tissue massage.
The 2nd step
We recommend everyone attend is the Intermediate Supine + Sidebody FasciAshi class. This is a prerequisite class for the Advanced course, and thereby the Clinical track of classes. This class has all the meat. This is where you learn the versatility of the strapwork and dive deeper into slower, more strategic and specific techniques. Learn to make ashiatsu effortless on your body (and yet still deeper than deep for your client!)
Here’s where you can really start to specialize in Barefoot Massage:
Relax Track:
If you have a spa, or trauma-informed safe space to provide massage with a focus on holistic healing, meditation, relaxation, self-care, “treat yo’self” and even escapism: follow our Relaxation track to fine-tune your box of tricks. We released the first track, Hot Ashi, in early 2019. This isn’t just hot pillows + barefoot massage. In a single day, this specialty class teaches you to change your direct downward pressure into a more shearing approach with heat (which magnifies pressure.) You’ll work with the mechanoreceptors and Ruffini nerve endings. (Relaxation CAN be nerdy!) We have more classes in the works for this track, but you’ll need to be Certified and trained at the Fundamentals level to gain access.
Sports Track:
Do you work with athletes and weekend warriors training to achieve certain mobility goals? How about people who are your size physically or don’t like/need deep pressure? Are your clients actively working to challenge their bodies?! Attend the ROM class. (It stands for Range of Motion.) This is more than just a table-thai massage, because we are teaching resisted and active movements with stretch theory to improve the quantity and quality of motion. You can get Certified at this level and gain access to our soon-to-be-released Sports Track of classes. That track is where we’ll focus on injury prevention, and activity-specific techniques to benefit your clients’ fitness gains. We are excited to introduce specialty tracks embedded with self-care that empowers your clients to take ownership of their own myofascial health. Of course, the Sports Track will address pre/post-event barefoot sports massage protocols, too.
Critical Thinking:
Need to get even deeper and more creative in your massages? Want to spice up any ashiatsu session you are already doing? Aim for the FasciAshi Advanced class. This is more than massaging with 2 feet. It’s all about how you really learn to go deep on a variety of body types using 1 or 2 of your feet. The Advanced class also works with the clients in side lying, supine and prone. (Plus some with unexpected in-between positions during the transitions!) You’ll get to distribute all or most of your weight safely while creatively sequencing together a unique series of strokes. We help your critical thinking skills come to the forefront so that you can cater this full body massage on the fly confidently.
Clinical Track:
Working with a client base who is fighting off chronic pain? Do you want to feel more confident in creating a treatment plan and work with assessments? After attending the Advanced class and passing your Certification there, you can dive into our more calculated classes that hone in on how to address specific conditions and past injuries. We’ll be using a very fascial, slow and direct approach to each region of the body. These upcoming Clinical Track classes will be heavily informed by Rolfing and myofascial release techniques. Your palpation skills and understanding of anatomy is crucial to the successful application of this specialty work.
Matwork:
Need to massage without limits? Learn Fijian Barefoot Massage – our matwork based class that doesn’t need a massage table or overhead bars. This stuff works so wonderfully with our FasciAshi Strap and/or a chair. Fijian is great to blend into existing matwork (take the compression work away from your aching wrists!) and easy to take on the road for events. If your client base is smaller than you, this massage will work better than our Myofascial Ashiatsu classes listed above. Why? You won’t have to hold up your weight in the bars. You can literally sit down on the job and give a great massage! Without using lubrication, this massage gets specific and trance-like. Fijian’s magic is in its clever use of toe-work. It finds a use for all the parts of your foot – not just the soles.
Additional Techniques:
We love to host classes from barefoot massage instructors outside of the FasciAshi universe. Watch for when our faculty hosts courses like Chavutti Thirumal and shiatsu or thai bodywork. Other complementary courses to help you niche down with your feet will show up at our training centers, too. Follow each instructor on our team to stay in the know.
To a certain extent, you can take these classes in any order to create the massage you need to give. (Heads up: some courses will have prerequisites.) This is a “choose your own adventure” style of learning. You don’t have to “do all the things” or take all the classes to give the best massage for your client. Just use what works from what you want to learn. Check out this flow chart to see how you can get to the class of your choice.
The owner of The Center for Barefoot Massage, Jeni Spring, has been massaging with her feet since 2003. At the beginning of westernized ashiatsu’s existence in the US – there was 1 class you could take. Just one. Any ashiatsu therapist who trained in the 1990’s learned what eventually became 2 classes later on in the early-mid ’00’s. Two more classes came out in the late 00’s, but that’s it. Just 4 classes.ย Us old-school ashi-folk ran out of options and were held back. We wanted to learn more, but there weren’t more classes available on the market.
The future of massage is afoot, and we are here for it!
The Center for Barefoot Massage stepped up in 2017 to stimulate the expansion of barefoot massage within the industry. We toil endlessly to support the growth of Barefoot Massage Therapists as they dig down and specialize in this work. We hope to increase barefoot massage awareness in the public so that there are more people looking for the massages we all love to give. And most of all, we don’t want you to get bored or burnt out on massaging!
For those of you who know me – you know that I love the ashiatsu portable bars. I was originally trained in ashiatsu on a very old style of the portables, (that were new at the time) and they feel like home to me. Although I honestly couldn’t afford them back then, I put my first set on a credit card and made sure I got my money’s worth out of them ASAP. Ever since, I’ve used them regularly at local Farmers’ Markets, sporting/yoga events and massage conventions. I’ve taught on portable bars across the country and in Germany. I used ashiatsu portable bars daily for 6 months at one point because I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in that location long enough to justify building permanent bars.
I just spent 3 solid days working on a set of portable bars that I own. Now that *anyone* can go buy a set of portables, I wanted to fill you in on all the things I don’t think anyone will actually tell you about them. HERE WE GO!
At the Center for Barefoot Massage, all of our manuals are designed with space for notes. Note-taking moves you from a passive to an active learner and allows you to better absorb and retain the information youโll be processing during class.
NOTE TAKING + TIPS TO DO IT BETTER.
1. HOW IT WORKS:
First off, note-taking requires effort so it feels like something we just donโt want to do, but the very act of taking the notes helps to form new pathways in your brain which increases the likely hood it will be stored in your long-term memory.
Notes taken via words or pictures or even better, both, will be super beneficial for your long term memory of the material as well as giving you something in your own words to look back on after class.
2. DONโT SKIMP.
Donโt be tempted to shorthand your notes or get lazy with them. Itโs better for your retention if you write as much as possible. Take it all in and write it all down. You never know what little tid-bit will stir your memory when you get back to your office ready to practice.
3. TAKING NOTES TAKES PRACTICE.
Note taking is a skill and I know you are pressed for time, so I will leave you with a video to check out, as well as a link to a frequently used system called Cornell Notes . Iโve also added a video that explains a technique called sketchnoting that includes adding images to your notes. Which brings us to our 4th and final tip:
4.DOODLE!
Adding images to your words helps to increase your retention.
In this Tuesday Toesdayย tip, we’ll show you how to add in a delightfully warm pillow to enhance your barefoot or hands-on massage. It’s perfect for the winter or even if you keep air conditioning running in your massage room year ’round.
Items needed (in addition to your massage table and all that jazz):
โ an inexpensive heating pad. I actually like them better than the expensive, flexible ones for this trick.
โ a standard pillowcase to cover theย heating pad. Small is good.
โ a king pillow (not a bolster) with a pillowcase on it. King is better than standard as even your sprawling clients will have support under their legs.
โ a massage table heating pad, turned on
(The “how-to” video’s at the bottom of this post.)
Cover the heating pad with the standard case. You couldย use the one that comes with it, but you only get one and it will need to be washed if you stand on it. Fold the corners over like you’re wrapping a present so you know where the heating pad actually is (this prevents you from placing the pillow on what appears to be the heating pad but is actually just the pillowcase).
Place the heating pad on a stable surface-I use a stool with a folded blanket on top toย protect the wood. I have also used a heat-resistant cutting board. It’s misplaced in a “safe place” right now, though.
You could use a chair or a table with something to protect it from the heat on it or even on top of a large hot towel cabi. Whatever you use, make sure the surface won’t get ruined with a hot heating pad on it.
Turn on the heating pad. I turn in on HIGH. When using one that has an actual temperature gauge, I set it to the 140ยฐF’s to 150ยฐF (60ยฐC to 65.5ยฐC. Make it too hot, and you’ll start dancing the Hot Foot Jig.
Place the pillow (in the pillowcase) on top of the heating pad. As it lies there, it’ll get super warm wherever the pillow is touching the heating pad.
When your client’s on the table, flip the pillow over so the heated side is UP, and slide it under your client’s legs. It’ll be super warm and feel amazing.
If you’re doing barefoot massage, put the heating pad on the floor and stand on it after you’ve cleaned your feet (I stand on it when I’m lubricating my client’s back). Your feet will be super cozy and warm when you start your barefoot massage. (You can see HERE how I keep my feet warm on even those days when I’m chilled to the bone.)
They can’t believe that you have even more magic feet than your amazing moves have shown thus far.
Do your massage thing.
When it’s time to flip the client over, pull out the pillow.
TURN IT OVER so the side that WAS down is now UP. Place it under your client’s legs.
More oohing and ahhing will commence.
You’re welcome. ๐
Who needs to have an awesome tip like this? Share this quick and easy, inexpensive tip to help them improve their massage!
Our FasciAshi Range of Motion (ROM) class is where stretch therapy meets ashiatsu massage. There is a growing presence of ‘stretch providers’ in the massage therapy, yoga and personal trainer industries, possibly due to the evolving understanding of the properties of fascia. The public is noticing more and more that a movement practice of some kind is essential to a healthy body – and some are turning to their massage therapists for help.
The human population is becoming more and more sedentary.
The leading cause of disability is musculoskeletal pain, and over 80% of acute and chronic injuries are caused by the body not moving properly.(I should know, I just spent a day on the couch writing this blog post!!) One goal of stretch therapy and movement re-education is to make the client more aware of their habits of movement and more comfortable in his or her body with less compensation.
We all need varying movement to maintain healthy tissue hydration, regeneration, and repair. Motion is lotion, no matter what lifestyle you live. The smooth moves we teach in the FasciAshi ROM class could be just the thing that your clients are ACHING to try!
Why should you start to consider using your FEET to massage with? I can think of a million reasons, but I boiled it down to just enough to count on one foot. 5 reasons to learn FasciAshi Barefoot Massage. Just five. Read on to see if we can further romance you into learning our favorite way to do deep tissue, myofascial release and trigger point work with our FasciAshi style of barefoot massage therapy.
1. HOW IT WORKS:
Who needs to have an awesome tip like this? Share this quick and easy, inexpensive tip to help them improve their massage!
