BLOG: Anatomy for Touch
Compressing, shearing, and tractioning soft tissues like skin, adipose, and muscle are a big part of our massage sessions, but other parts of our anatomy can benefit from therapeutic touch as well, including the sinewy, boney areas like the wrists and ankles. Keeping these areas healthy may...
Can you guess which one of these is the REAL Fascia? They've both been labeled fascia, yet are quite different from each other.
They not only LOOK different, but they FEEL different under our hands, FUNCTION differently in the body and RESPOND differently to touch and loading.
What gives? Well,...
Visible scars start at the surface, but what we see on the skin may just be the tip of the iceberg. Scars can run deep, affecting multiple tissues at once, influencing their texture, function, and relationship with each other. Scar tissue feels different under our hands. Often more fibrotic...
The trapezius is the broad, superficial, paired muscle of the upper back and a long-time favorite in bodywork. Our clients' frequent request for focus on the upper back and shoulders comes as a result of the daily hit their traps take – whether from their desk jobs and driving their cars or...
The soles of our feet are under a lot of stress — mechanical stress, that is. Consider how much we rely on our plantar foot to quietly manage some pretty impactful tasks, from bearing our body weight as we stand at the massage table to absorbing impact as we walk, run, or jump. Our...
Anatomical drawings and dissection images often depict the IT Band as a two-dimensional "strap" on the lateral thigh, leaving us with an incomplete picture that doesn't exactly match what we feel beneath our hands. Broadening our understanding to include a three-dimensional view of the deep...
The Cutest Little Ligaments
Between the skin-we-touch and the muscles-we-palpate, lies a whole world of tissue and activity that is often under-addressed in our anatomy books, including one extraordinary structure we massage every day called the skin ligaments(Latin: retinacula cutis). They are...
