No Pain No Gain?

Recently, I received a massage from someone who stayed well beyond my pain threshold regardless of my verbal and non-verbal requests to adjust softer. Have you had that experience? I'm going to reassure you right away: this is NOT good practice. Your massage therapist should listen to you and meet you where you're at.

Your boundaries are your own. Everybody is different, and there are more factors than just muscle tension at play in what makes your limit what it is. You can be having a bad day, or week, or month, be menstruating, or you just didn't sleep well, and any of those can play a factor in how sensitive you are. Or maybe like me, you know what areas can take a maximum dose of pressure and which areas need more warming up before they're ready.

Pain during your massage does not inherently make it a bad massage, but there's a difference between "good pain" and pain for its own sake. The person experiencing it is ultimately the person who is in charge of where that difference lies.

Depending on the goal of the session and the physical complaints of the client, my own massage may easily stay right on the boundary of what is tolerable. But even if the client doesn't speak up to tell me, if I feel their body tensing against it or pulling away, it's time to back off. A body fighting the treatment is receiving nothing useful from it.

Sometimes it's enough to go gentler but repeatedly over the same area until the tension is released. Sometimes I have to back off entirely. And yet other times I re-evaluate what is going on and take an entirely different approach. I might go at the tension from a different point in the muscle, or at a cooperative muscle, or I might cup (pulling out instead of pushing in) or use other tools to address the problem.

There are also specific techniques which are going to be painful on almost anyone, and they are used to address really specific issues. While some therapists may prefer not to forewarn their clients to prevent them fighting, I prefer to be more direct. I want my clients to know that I know it hurts, and that the pain is expected, why I'm doing it anyway, and that they can in fact opt out if it's too much. If possible, I prefer to do it slowly to allow them to work with me. Sometimes I may guide their breathing or ask them to move in a certain way while I hold or manipulate a point.

No matter what I think is going on, or its benefits, if my client tells me that they need something different, I make the adjustment. It's their massage, not mine. They might have thought they needed one thing when we began but found that their needs changed or were different than they expected, and that's just fine.

That awful massage therapist who didn't listen and kept saying "no pain no gain" while I squirmed and asked them to please be more gentle? I will never allow them to handle my body again.