When people think about improving their work as a manual therapist, they usually focus on skills: Better assessments, better hands-on techniques, and better clinical thinking. Don’t get me wrong, all of that matters. But something that often gets overlooked is the environment you’re working in, and how much that environment influences your outcomes.

If you put your thoughts, beliefs, or work out into the world, whether that’s on social media, in your clinic, or in conversations with other professionals, you are going to face criticism. Not just occasionally, but probably consistently.

Athletes will experience pain. That’s not a possibility, it’s a guarantee. The role of a manual therapist is not just to “fix” pain, but to help the athlete understand it, navigate it, and ultimately adapt in a way that allows them to keep training and performing. To do that effectively, we need a structured approach.

Assessing Global flexion gives a massage therapist clinically useful information about load tolerance, tissue extensibility, neuromuscular control, and symptom behavior, all of which directly influence pain presentation, injury risk, and treatment strategy, especially with SI, low back, or hip pain.

For massage therapists, assessing shoulder motion is important because it informs clinical reasoning, safety, and treatment effectiveness within the scope of practice. In part 1 of our shoulder motion assessment breakdown, we will complete the global movement check of the shoulder by assessing the Apley IRE.

While movement screening is more commonly associated with physical therapists or trainers, it offers distinct, valuable benefits when integrated into massage therapy, as long as it stays within the scope of practice.

Is IASTM, also known as “scraping”, an effective means of soft tissue work? The use of tools to treat soft tissue dates back thousands of years.

A good massage therapist has a full toolbox of techniques, deep tissue work, trigger point therapy, stretching, mobilization, and can skillfully apply them to ease a client’s pain in the moment. They create relief, restore movement, and send the client home feeling better than when they arrived. But a great massage therapist goes a step further.

Soft Tissue Mobilization (STM) is an umbrella term used to describe manual, hands-on techniques that manipulate and promote the movement of soft tissues such as fascia, muscles, tendons, etc. You will see the term applied to many different forms of manual therapy; however, we focus on the utilization of movement, both active and passive, during the manual manipulation of tissue.

Movement occurs with constant feedback from the senses, and adjustments are made in milliseconds by the brain.

Muscle energy techniques are derived from osteopathic medicine and involve submaximal isometric contractions to mobilize and manipulate soft tissues to address musculoskeletal dysfunction.