Soma’s July 2016 Graduation
Needless to say, we are beyond proud of all our graduates. Here are a few pics we managed to snap during the event. We’re sure they are are going to do great things in the field of massage.
An Open Letter to Anderson Cooper
Dear Mr. Cooper,
I’m a massage therapist and massage teacher in Chicago. I’ve been made aware of some comments you made on Live! With Kelly Thursday morning concerning the industry of massage therapy. I’d like to start out by assuring you I have a sense of humor. I can even make jokes about this job that I love so much. But I would like to address some issues.
First, I’m truly sorry you haven’t had a good massage experience. One of the first things we teach our students is to speak as little as possible during a massage session, and I don’t know who worked on you, but that behavior is certainly frowned upon.
For the most part, though, we all love our jobs. It can be physically demanding, sometimes it can be emotionally draining, but we love it. We love that with massage, we have to take , to speed up their recovery time after a workout, to reduce their stress and anxiety, to slow the progression of certain chronic diseases, and even to improve productivity in the workplace. In fact, this is the only job I can think of where people are always happy to see me (aside from the occasional snarky silver fox).
The portrayal of our profession has been skewered for a very long time, and I get it, we’re an easy target. People take off their clothes and let us touch them. It’s like we’re gifting you the setup and then half of the punch line, too. But it’s a profession that has been around for over five thousand years. There are hieroglyphs in Egyptian tombs of pharaohs receiving massage. I’m not going to run down the whole history here, but our field has been repeatedly legitimized in the medical community for its therapeutic benefits, and many hospitals even employ massage therapists to aid in a wide variety of conditions (cancer victims, stroke victims, spinal cord injuries, etc).
Of course, for every step forward in changing the public’s opinion of massage therapy, there is a Jennifer Love Hewitt portraying a massage therapist prostitute. Two steps back. And for every person we help on the road to recovery there are ten people making jokes about “happy endings.”
There are many people like me who work very hard in a profession we believe very much in, and it’s very difficult to see it trivialized over and over again. I know you were just having fun on a morning talk show, and look, I hate when people are too sensitive about jokes, too. But I can’t help it. It galls me. It galls me that I have to keep defending this field that has given me so much. It galls me that the jokes are never that creative. It galls me that, after teaching massage for nearly five years, I have students who I believe have the power to change people’s lives become discouraged by the attitudes they face from their friends, families and strangers. It galls me that my very gifted female students will at some point have to face off against men who, because of the media’s prompting, believe in the over-sexualization of our very professional and regulated industry. It galls me that this isn’t the first letter I’ve written, and it probably won’t be the last.
All that being said; I am a fan. I side with your progressive views pretty much across the board. I just wish you’d turn that progressive eye towards our field.
Again, I don’t write this with any hard feelings towards you, just with the wish that you’d maybe be a little more open minded about my profession. Yes, there are some bad massage therapists. But there are also some bad TV journalists, right? I promise when you find the right massage therapist your feelings will do a complete 180 (and then stop there!).
If you read this, thanks for your time. I appreciate it and I appreciate you.
Sincerely,
Jason VonGerichten
Clinical Massage Therapist
Biceps Brachii: The Most Misunderstood Muscle
When someone says the word “muscle” to you, what do you think of? Maybe the pecs, maybe the calves, but if someone were to ask you to flex your muscles, your go to muscle would be biceps brachii. Maybe because it is very visible, maybe because we’ve all seen what happens to Popeye after eating his spinach, but for some reason biceps brachii is the muscle we all think of when we think of muscles.
Here’s the thing though: We don’t really need our biceps.
Biceps brachii has three actions: it can flex the shoulder, it can flex the elbow, and it can supinate the forearm (turn your palm upwards). Well, we’ve got three other muscles that can flex the shoulder (pectoralis major, anterior deltoid, coracobrachialis). We’ve got two other powerful elbow flexors (brachialis and brachioradialis). And we have a muscle to supinate that’s actually named supinator (supinator). So what do we need this biceps for, anyway?
Looks good at the beach. Makes you look swole.
Does that mean if your plane is crashing and you need to jettison extra weight you should get rid of your biceps? As amusing as that sounds, no, that’s probably a bad idea. Your biceps does connect your torso to your forearm by originating on your scapula (at the supraglenoid tubercle and the coracoid process) and inserts just past your elbow on your forearm (at the radial tuberosity and the bicipital aponeurosis). This means that if you’re transferring force from your torso to your forearm, say like when you’re throwing a baseball, the biceps plays a key role in doing so.
So biceps is good for something. Great. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
Since biceps is multiarticular (crosses two or more joints) it is susceptible to insufficiencies. It can become actively insufficient when it tries to perform all its actions at the same time. Imagine lifting a heavy weight by both flexing your elbow and your shoulder, versus just flexing your forearm. Basically the muscle becomes weaker when you take .
Biceps can also become passively insufficient when it is elongated across all of its joints at the same time, thereby limiting your range of motion.
But the one you’re probably most familiar with is bicipital tendonitis. Tendonitis, quite simply, is the inflammation of a tendon. Tendonitis can be caused by trauma, or it can be secondary to other pathologies (like arthritis), but most often it is caused by overuse. Too many repeated overhand motions. Athletes such as baseball players, tennis players and swimmers are all common recipients of bicipital tendonitis. And we can help with this!
Of course, initially, we treat this with ice and rest. Let the body heal itself. But in the later subacute stages of injury (about three weeks in) we can start massaging to help the healing process. This would involve releasing tension in the biceps, thereby lessening the tug of the muscle on its inflamed tendon, as well as cross-fiber frictioning to the tendon itself to bring extra blood flow, stimulate the healing process, and make it so the body lays down a nice, mobile bit of scar tissue that won’t limit the client’s range of motion once healing is complete. Follow this up with a stretch to the muscle and tendon (and it doesn’t have to be the most profound stretch in the world, just enough to lengthen the fibers) and an eccentric contraction (muscle contracts while lengthening) of the muscle to reset the muscle length. Follow with an ice massage to help control the localized inflammation you just creating with your frictioning, and have them come back twice a week for about four weeks. If there is no improvement after four weeks, they may need to revisit their doctor.
To learn this treatment and more, talk to someone from our admissions department!
Massage Therapy and Health and Wellness Coaching
Massage therapists know that massage has many health benefits from stress reduction to pain relief, and many Americans have chosen to make massage therapy a part of their healthy lifestyle regiment. But, what if there was a way for massage therapists to offer more in the realm of wellness care? A health and wellness coach can be the key to helping clients manage and maintain their health, and massage therapists are seeing that blending massage therapy and health and wellness coaching has increased their clientele and revenue.
Health and wellness coaches work with clients to help them establish goals, maintain motivation, hold them accountable and focus on their successes as they change and manage their lifestyle so that it embodies health and wellness.
If adding health and wellness coaching services to your practice is something you are interested in, then consider The Soma Institute’s 110 hour Health and Wellness Coaching Program.
The entire program is taught on-site at The Soma Institute’s Campus in Chicago, Illinois making it a fully interactive program. It is one of the few coaching programs in the United States that is entirely taught on-site.
Massage therapists that enroll can earn continuing education hours while completing the program.
After successful completion of the program, students will be certified as a Health and Wellness Coach through The Soma Institute.
Find out more here!
Your Swivel Chair Is Trying to Kill You
The human body is not built for sitting in a swivel chair for eight hours a day. And yet that’s what many of us do. Thousands of years of hunting and gathering has not left us with bodies designed for staring at a computer, filling out TPS reports and wishing a plague upon our copiers. Will our bodies one day evolve into a structure better suited for office work? Or will the office work evolve to be better suited for our hunter gatherer bodies? Nobody knows for sure. What we do know is there are a few things you can do to mitigate the unhealthiness of our day-to-day activities.
- Get up, and get up often. It’s often said that sitting is the new smoking. Staying stationary for the better part of your day wreaks havoc on your body’s systems. Blood needs to move around your body to oxygenate your tissues, and it can’t do that if you’re not moving. Once an hour, get up and move around for a few minutes.
- Stretch it out. While you’re up moving around, stretch out your body, especially your hip flexors. Those muscles are most likely to adapt to a shortened position after sitting in a flexed position all day long. Stand up, grab your foot (as if trying to kick yourself in the behind) and pull your leg back. Then touch your toes to stretch out your hamstrings, as your knees are flexed, too.
- Sit up straight. Tension neck syndrome, upper crossed syndrome, or head too far forward syndrome, call it what you want, but it’s making us all look like cavemen again. We were doing great, evolving upwards as we should, until we all got smart phones and laptops, and now we’re hunched forward all the time. Remember, you can look down with your eyes without bending your head forward, and whenever you think of it, tuck your chin back into your neck, like you’re trying to make a double chin for yourself. This opens up space at the base of your cranium, giving a small but significant stretch to your suboccipital muscles, which are often short and tight.
- Get a massage! It’s been proven in study after study that workers are actually more productive after receiving a 15 minute chair massage. Massage has many benefits, from increased circulation to decreasing pain levels, to activating your parasympathetic nervous system, better known as your “rest and digest” function. When your body is in parasympathetic mode it gets to reboot itself, and you come out of a massage refreshed and more energetic.
- Drink more water and eat healthy food. If you have coworkers who like to bring in baked goods for everyone this can be challenging. Bring your own healthy snacks and keep them at your desk. Fruit, nuts, carrots, etc. If your coworkers insist you have a piece of their birthday cake, you can fake a phone call and run away screaming “Not Grandma!” Or you could fake an allergy after asking what’s in it. “Vanilla? That could kill me, Cheryl!” Or you could be honest and say you’re trying to monitor your sugar intake, and you wish them a happy birthday all the same.