If you’re not aware of how you use both your feet and hands (applying lubricant, moving sheets or limbs, etc.) then it’s quite possible you aren’t giving your clients the best massage ever.

And that’s our goal. Every. Dang. Time. 

You may be amazing in treating your clients with the appropriate pressure and perfect moves, but if everything else isn’t spot on, fuggedaboutit.

From Jiffy Lube to Sheet Shredders, here’s what to look out for:

✓ How do you get up onto the table? Do you get up from the side, shifting your weight so that your table shifts a bit (particularly a problem with electric tables). Do you use your client’s back for leverage to hoist yourself up? (Pretty please tell me you don’t do that! I’ve seen it in class, though!)

Or do you use your strap to help diffuse the step so that your client barely feels you move onto the table?

✓ Hopping. No, no, NO!

You may not think you’re hopping, but do you shift your weight from side to side without going anywhere? I see this a lot while therapists stand at the client’s waist-they can’t figure out where to go next or what foot to use, so they just shift. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Ok, I’ll massage now.

✓ Jiffy Lube? That’s a car oil change place. Save the quick moves for running after a diaperless baby or defending yourself from evil mutant ninjas. Apply your lubricant nice and slowly, just like you do for hands-on massage.

✓❄Cryotherapy❄: most people don’t want it unless you catch a woman in the middle of a hot flash. Warm those tootsies. See how here and here. (Yes, I wrote 2 blog posts about this already, because cold feet massaging in the wintertime just plain stinks.)

Hands should be warm. If your hands are cold and you need to move a client’s limb, don’t shock them with your icy fingers. Wrap the sheet around the limb if you can before you move them to protect it from hypothermia. ❄

But wait! There’s more…

✓ Sheet shredders? If your feet have gotten stuck on your sheets, then give your self a daggum pedicure. Nobody wants unplanned exfoliation or sliced skin.

As the famous Sweet Brown says, “Oh Lordy, ain’t nobody got time for that. “ 😉

✓ Draping: as a reminder, oftentimes the most conservative draping is the kind that you’ll get your toes caught up in, revealing that which you didn’t intend to expose. 

Tuck your sheet under the UNcovered leg. I’ll show you why in a Tuesday Toesday post one of these days. Suffice it to say, if you tuck under the covered leg, and they move their exposed leg, nothing’s left to cover the bits and parts.

Don’t use a bean bag to hold the draping in place on your client’s hips. That would be a lesson in “How to try to keep your client safe and secure when, in fact, you will completely expose him.”

✓ Butt squish: Assuming you are not sitting on your clients (we better not hear that you did THAT!) Butt Squish occurs when you place one foot on each side of the client’s hip, stepping onto the sheet that is loosely draped on their hips and off the side.

Stepping onto the sheet with both feet will draw the fabric tight, making their hiney squoosh down.

It’s just plain weird.

Eliminate that by tucking each side of the sheet by the client’s sheet neatly by the hips.

How to get better:

✓ Receive your own barefoot massage and put off the sleeping until nighttime. Pay attention to your therapist: what do you notice you like? What should s/he improve upon?

✓ Video record yourself. You need it for your certification anyway (unless you’re the fab kind that already did that.) There’s nothing like discovering what you look like when you work.

✓ Use the client evaluation forms available on the membership site. If you’re the only barefoot massage therapist they’ve ever had, maybe they think your jostling them about vigorously is what’s supposed to happen. (Tip: it’s not.)

✓ Revitalize. If there’s room, our instructors will let you re-take a day or 2 of Fundamentals class so we can check your body mechanics and break bad habits.

How do you think you fare?

Leave a comment on FB or here and let us know if and where YOU need to improve!