Using the Breath to Massage Better

We all know breathing well is crucial for good health. But merely telling our clients to "take a deep breath" is not enough. Instead, this course will introduce you to how to utilize your client’s breath to their advantage, to help improve their own health and happiness. (Along the way, you’ll learn about how you are breathing as well, since utilizing your own breath more efficiently will make you a happier therapist, too!)

We will see how the breath—and more specifically, our very common "dysfunctional" breathing patterns—are implicated in many of the problems that bring clients into our offices. Nearly all of your clients complain about tension in their back, neck, and shoulders. And many of your clients are aware of the value of breathing well. But what if these two aspects of good health are more linked than we realize? What many therapists and most client's don't realize is that improving their breath will also lessen their pain.

This course will explore the breathing patterns endemic to our hurried contemporary lives, and the "dysfunctional" or "paradoxical" or just plain effort-full breaths that result. We'll assess our clients in order to see, and palpate, this epidemic of overuse of the secondary muscles of respiration. Through video, your course instructor will demonstrate an easy and effective solution: not trying to get the client to breathe better, but instead encouraging the client to breathe easier. You will cultivate the ability to lengthen the exhale, and in turn allow the inhale to happen by itself, thus allowing these overused muscles of the upper back and neck to return to neutral, and encourage the diaphragm to reclaim its job as the primary mover of respiration.

You’ll learn manual techniques, both in prone and supine, to create more pliability in the rib cage and in those secondary muscles of respiration, as well as simple verbal suggestions to offer the client during your sessions. This combination will allow your clients to move more easily and breathe more easily, so that over time they can become aware of their own breath and learn to breathe without unnecessary effort.