Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/68173
YOU CAN SEE THESE TECHNIQUES IN MASSAGE & BODYWORK'S DIGITAL EDITION, WHICH FEATURES A VIDEO CLIP FROM ADVANCED-TRAININGS.COM'S ADVANCED MYOFASCIAL TECHNIQUES DVD SERIES. THE LINK IS AVAILABLE AT BOTH WWW.MASSAGEANDBODYWORK.COM AND WWW.ABMP.COM. or too deeply, instead try shorter sessions with small, supportive, calming interventions. Watch to see how your client responds to your work, both within your session and between sessions. Gradually increase duration, scope, or depth as your client is ready. You can always work a little more next time, but it is hard to take back your work, once you've already done too much. Work elsewhere in the body, before and after approaching any injured or painful areas. This broadens your client's awareness beyond his or her places of injury and pain. Use the metaphor of a tangle of yarn or string: you wouldn't go right to the tightest part of a tangle and start pulling. Instead, work at the periphery, gently and patiently loosening the overall pattern. Instead of mobilizing the neck, encourage motility. Use your client's gentle active motion (i.e., motility) to restore subtle movement to spastic areas, instead of applying passive manipulation, stretching, or direct release techniques (which do mobilize, but could re-aggravate). Breath, active exploration of range of motion, and even micromovements will help restore disrupted reflexes and prevent tissue adhesion. Direct work with gross movement barriers or tissue restrictions come later, once muscular splinting has subsided and injured tissues are less inflamed. There are many ways to work that accomplish these goals; much of what you probably already know about relaxing and calming can be extremely effective when applied with the above considerations in mind. A specific technique that incorporates these principles is the Breath Motility Technique. BREATH MOTILITY TECHNIQUE Breath has the power to calm the nervous system, to catalyze lost motility, and to bring proprioceptive Dizziness and vertigo after whiplash can be exacerbated by loss of adaptability in the neck, limiting the body's ability to position the head and adapt to stimulus from the balance mechanisms of the inner ear. Image courtesy of Primal Pictures. Used with permission. awareness to the otherwise healthy regions that have been eclipsed by the painful areas. Begin by asking your client to take a normal breath, and look to see where the thorax moves the most with inhalation. Using a soft, receptive touch, "sandwich" that place, front and back, between your two hands, as in Image 3. Whether breath starts in the belly, diaphragm, or chest, ask your client to gently allow the space between your hands to fill with a normal breath. Note that we didn't say, "push the breath between my hands," or even "breathe here." Those imperatives will evoke a more efforted response than the invitation simply to "allow" the breath to fill between your hands. Our aims are to calm the autonomic responses, induce gentle active movement in places that have lost it, and increase proprioception. Try it in your own body—a forcibly inhaled breath doesn't accomplish those aims as well as a breath that you simply allow to come in on its own. You'll be able to palpate It can be helpful when working with hot whiplash to imagine working on a bare nervous system. Hyperextension injury to the cervical portion of the sympathetic trunks of prevertebral ganglia (along the front of the spine in green) is thought to contribute to vertigo and other autonomic symptoms associated with whiplash. Image courtesy of Primal Pictures. Used with permission. connect with your colleagues on massageprofessionals.com 113