Lazy Rainy Sunday

Dullsville here. More rain, no massage bookings. Spent the day in my PJs. Kids have been out of school all week, and they're driving me (and each other) Crazy.

I've recently found this great (and I really mean that) site for massage, if any of you are practicioners. Or, if you're just interested in self care. The stretching pdfs are excellent. They are also the source for the massage videos I've posted from YouTube.
Massaged L today, and that was a good thing. Spouses or S.O.'s of therapists are sort of like the children of cobblers...actually, our kids get massage fairly often, but L claims it was 4 months since I worked on her. She needs to use the foam roller on her IT band , more. You prolly should too, if you're riding a bunch. Her shoulders ( Trapezius, and Levator Scap in particular) also needed work- but almost everyone is in that boat. Our friend A_____ came over while I was working on her neck, and we spoke about A_____'s issues. She's got some undiagnosed (because her doctors can't figure out what the deal is) condition which is causing her lots of nervous pain down her leg and foot drop. I'm not a doctor and I don't play one anywhere. Alls I know is some massage. I had referred her to the guy I consider my mentor, and I wanted to know how her session had gone. I was very surprised to hear she was disappointed. I was surprised because the guy has such a great sense of underlying patterns of muscular imbalances, and is so effective with issues involving deep tissue. On the other hand, I'm not so surprised because he's a kook. He doesn't address the issue the client talks about, if he feels something else requires work. Most people- ok, almost all people not already familiar with receiving massage- think they know what they need. And that's understandable. (And there is a right and a wrong way to receive a massage.) So if you complain that your shoulder is bugging you, and the guy works almost exclusively on your low back...you might be pissed. And that's understandable. The thing is, your body is as interconnected as any spider web. Any pull on the web is going to pull all the fibers. So you may feel discomfort at the shoulder which has a root cause in a strain from an injury in your low back, and which you might not feel there because you have had that injury/strain so long you've become accustomed to it (and now feel it as normal or have blocked off your awareness of it cuz no one wants to live in pain and your brain can&will block the signals of discomfort/pain of a certain magnitude). And since it took some time to develop this set of circumstances, you betta recognize it will take more than one session to "fix" a problem. Massage works gradually to best effect in that some muscles can't relax until the strain from other muscles is relaxed first. And if the pattern of holding is chronic, it's affecting more than just the muscle in which you feel (most) pain- again with the web analogy, a muscle in distress will recruit surrounding muscles to help reduce it's strain.
Sooo, back to my guy-he also phrases things oddly and says things like " try and pedal the bike from the point of view of your circulatory system." Bastard. It took me months to understand what that meant. I had the issue I've mentioned before with my left Psoas and the dead spot in my pedal stroke. Every ride I'd at one point or several come back to wondering what the hell that meant. Bastard! And then I began entertaining the voodoo notion of reaching down the hip and leg with my awareness [typing this type of horseshit is making me uncomfortable], and it helped. It helped bring my focus to the area, that I'd unconsciously avoided before- to the point of hiking my hip while standing at the sink doing dishes. This is what it took for me to start addressing this...which ultimately got a lot better with massage from this guy and with the Lemond wedges (a product about which I'd never have entertained notions prior).
And back to A_____ and my guy together. It all boils down to that "click". A_____ is not the 1st person I've referred to my guy who won't or can't get past the kook factor. They don't click. She says she preferred my massage, though I referred her because I know he's more capable of doing the needed work than I am. But she's comfortable with me- as comfortable as A_____ can be receiving massage, cuz she herself is a kook of another sort.
The proper way to receive massage is to relax- be lazy. Don't anticipate or expect. That seems to be the proper way to do a lot of things. It requires a certain level of comfort to get to that point though.
One of my teachers told the story of some guy whose name I've forgotten who came to massage from a structural engineering background. He approached massage the same way, and became so good that people would come to him even though he smoked cigarettes (during the session! can you imagine that in this era of witchhunting?) and drank whiskey (during the session!). I picture him: all sweaty, shirtless or tanktopped, maybe wearing a headband and dropping ash on blissed out people getting healed. I don't smoke, but I aspire to that vision of beatific perfection.

Found a picture of the fake rust on the True mtb from NAHMBS. Yep, fake.