If you have read the front page and you are interested in how we can achieve that more permanent solution we mentioned, this page is for you. 

      The thing that seperates us from the rest of the massage industry is the way the veiw the body and work on the body.  We view the body different becuase of a tool that we learned called Posture Analysis. 
      Postural Analysis is a way of looking at the body so that you can 'see movement while a person stands still'. Posture is the platform of the body that all movement comes from. If that platform is not correct neither will be any of the movement that comes from that platform. Why does this matter you ask? People rarely hurt themselves laying still (kind of obvious but felt the need to state it), they usually hurt themselves using their body.  This use involves movement and if that movement is not performed either correctly or with the proper muscles because your posture is off then you will hurt yourself.  It may not even happen that day or that week but the body will eventually not be able to handle the improper forces you have been applying to it. At some point you will hit what we call the breaking point. 
      You have heard of a person playing 3 rounds of golf a week for months only to hurt themselves by picking up a pencil from the ground. It had nothing to do with the pencil or the weight of the object being picked up. It was all about the fact that your body had had enough of bad habits and poor posture.  Injuries play a role in this in that when you hurt yourself you compensate for that pain and eventually it goes away but did the compensation or the tightening of the tissues that you used to protect yourself.  In either case the platform for movement is comprimised and will not allow for proper function in the body. All of this bad posture and improper movement creates an imbalance in the body. Posture Analysis is what we use to see the imbalance in the body.  This analysis of your body and seeing the imbalance allows for us as therapists to decide what course of action would be needed to get you feeling better. 

      Now that we see what is causing you to feel the way you do, what do we do about it? First I would like to make a HUGE distinction that will seperate us from other massage therapists even more. We are not really working on muscles. That's right we don't. We work on a connective tissue called Fascia. Fascia is the connective tissue that is so hard to cut through when you are trying to cut meat.  It is what creates seperation of tissues in the body and is what gives muscles shape and holds the structure of our body together.  
      A little anatomy for a minute. A muscle that is not surrounded in fascia is a water based protien that can stretch 150 times its normal length. Fascial connective tissue prevents this from happening.  Fascia does have some elasticity. That is why when you reach down fast to touch your toes it will be more successful than when you move slowly.  This elasticity is why most things people do to stop pain dont work for the long haul.  The body goes back to the way it was.  When we do bodywork or move extremely slow we are trying to break down the fascial restrictions that are stopping you from moving and having a free body.  Fascia does not release like what you would think.  It needs slow consistant pressure to get the tissue to build up some internal friction allowing it to soften into a gel like state again.  
     One more thing that we would like to communicate about would be compensation patterns.  Compensation patterens can be caused by poor posture, bad habits, injuries, and even learned responses from people you like and emulate. Any and all of these could be or are present in your body.  To put it simply a compensation pattern is when you do not use your body in the proper way so that you have to use different muscles than what should be used to accomplish a specific task.  An example of this would be if your Humeral head of your shoulder (shoulder joint) is being pushed foward or dragged foward, even just an 1/8th of an inch, due to a over contracted muscle.  When you go to lift your arm you will not be using the propler muscle structures that you would normally use to make this action happen.  Over time you will have stregthen improper muscles and caused the muscles in your arm to compensate for that imbalance.