Pregnancy is accompanied by thousands of emotional and physical changes. Even the “easiest” and “best” ones come with an array of challenges. An effective prenatal massage therapist can help with these challenges, both throughout your three trimesters and after pregnancy. In decades past, most women were advised to avoid massage during the first trimester. Medical studies have since found that as long as you are healthy, massage during the first trimester is totally okay! Read More This Blog
Bodyworks DW has always used
fair hiring practices. What this means is, we review applicants based on their
qualifications and experiences. We find that it’s best to put the focus on the
ability to do the job. You end up with a diverse staff of people from all walks
of life.
Back in June, our C.E.O and
owner David Weintraub made a statement on racial injustice, inequality, and
anti-racism in wellness. He outlined how the company hopes to be more vocal on
these types of social issues. In it, he states “Black lives matter. Period, end
stop.” and highlights our plans for change. You can read the entire post here.
We’ve added an important note
about being anti-racist and anti-sexist to our mission statement. Generally
speaking, if you’re a human and are in pain, our goal has always been to help
you by providing massage therapy with long term solutions. In order to ensure
we deliver the best possible care as healthcare providers, it’s important that
we set biases to the side. We strive to both promote anti-racism in wellness
and diversity in our workplace and create a known safe space with intentional
anti-racist and anti-sexist policies. Read our full mission statement here.
Speaking of our anti-racist and
anti-harassment policies, we’ve added a page to our website that describes this
in detail. We want to make sure staff and clients alike know Bodyworks DW is a
space completely intolerant of ignorance. Click here to read the entire pledge.
If you look on our website and
click on our page titled Actions For Progressive
Social Change, you can see the list of organizations such as
the ACLU that we support and proudly
donate to regularly.
Read More....
David
Weintraub, LMT and owner of Bodyworks DW, writes about post massage self care
and how you can take the benefits of your medical massage home with you. Stay
ahead of your pain!
Medical
massage in New York with a NYC licensed massage therapist should
be a regular and valuable part of your self care routine. Let’s face it...New
Yorkers are not known for doing things gently. We work long hours, slam weights
at the gym, and then maybe hit back to back yoga classes. And while this
additive approach to health does have it’s benefits, it’s not restorative. Our
bodies need time to heal. To help with that, here are some of our best post
massage self care practices to take the benefits your medical massage home with
you!
A great
medical massage helps to relax both your muscles and your nervous system. It
gives your brain time to switch out of your sympathetic nervous system (fight
or flight!). And engages your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest)
in a way that has benefits for long after the massage.
In a
perfect world we would all get massages every other day and feel fantastic 🙂 Given the
reality of time and money this is simply not going to happen. However, there
are plenty of practices you can take on to extend the great results of your
massage between sessions. These will assist you in feeling great, allow you to
go longer between massages, and help keep you from getting injured.
Post
Massage Self Care: Practices to take the benefits of medical massage home with
you
Lying
Down with Your Feet up on a Chair
This is the
number 1 homework assignment we give to all of our stressed out massage
clients! It’s super easy, and it’s a great excuse to chill out a bit every day.
We spend so much time sitting that our muscles get locked up tight in a sitting
position. Which helps us to sit, but is terrible for just about everything else
we try to do.
Lying down
with you lower legs on a chair puts us in the same position as sitting but
without needing to hold ourselves up in gravity. It passively shortens our
psoas muscle (main hip flexor), quads, hamstrings, and calves. When you shorten
a muscle but don’t make it do any work it gets to completely relax. It usually
takes 4-5 minutes for your nervous system to chill enough to truly let go of
your muscles. We recommend doing this for 5-8 minutes every night before bed to
help you get a really good night's sleep.
All of our clients who have taken this
practice on notice huge results in about 2-3 weeks. Decreased
low back pain or tension, better sleep, easier mood.
How we Use the Newest Science in our Sessions
At Bodyworks DW, a top rated massage therapy
studio in New York NYC, our therapists stay abreast of peer-reviewed, current research.
These science-backed findings are integrated into your sessions. They also help
to provide insight into the pain or discomfort you are feeling.
The best massage therapists are able to
understand scientific literature as it relates to human anatomy. And be able to
explain it to you in simpler language that is easy to understand.
Bodyworks DW therapists are ready to help you
find out if massage therapy could be a positive factor in your life as well.
The goals of the best massage therapists in New York City are to help you
achieve your personal health and life goals. If you see a Bodyworks DW massage
therapist in Midtown NYC or in the Financial District, you can be confident you
are receiving the highest quality care.
Would you like to schedule a professional
massage with a top rated massage therapist in New York City? In addition to our
original Financial District location, you can find the best massage therapist
near midtown west now too–our new studio here just recently opened! Contact
Bodyworks DW today or click on the button to book online at our massage Midtown
or massage Fidi studios!
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Massage therapy and other holistic health care practices are gaining traction in health care. As they become more popular, so too does the push to support the observed benefits of these practices with scientific research on massage therapy.
When it comes to the human body, things get
complicated and murky pretty quickly. We know a lot about the body. But there
is likely much more about its workings and operations that we have yet to
uncover. There has long been a large and ever-growing body of empirical and
anecdotal evidence in support of massage therapy. Now, massage therapists are
looking for these results to be backed by hard science.
The use of precise massage therapy protocols
to measure and show best results are gaining greater interest. We now have a
wave of small-scale studies that examine massage therapy in highly specific
contexts. The scientific research on massage therapy has begun!
Massage therapy organizations such as
the American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) are working on getting massage therapy accepted as a
standard form of health care (hello, insurance companies, we see you…).
Getting massage therapy to be covered by insurance the same as other practices
will largely depend on what science has to say about it.
Competitive athlete? Weekend warrior?
Recreational fitness enthusiast? At Bodyworks DW, we work with a wide variety
of active individuals. Our therapists provide custom-designed sports massage sessions
focused on helping you maximize your activity enjoyment. This can include
sessions for injury recovery, injury prevention, tune-ups and maintenance.
Sports massage in NYC for active people and athletes is hardly a luxury – it’s
an investment!
Sports massage for athletes provides targeted,
therapeutic treatment tailored to the bio mechanics and physical needs of the
athlete. In other words, it’s not going to be like your typical fluff n’ buff
spa massage 😉 You’re going to be moving around a bit for
analysis. You and your therapist will be working together on increasing range
of motion and unwinding injuries. And you’re going to get some homework!
Curious how a sports massage for athletes in
NYC might work for you? We’ve taken some of our most common client-athlete
cases and given you a run-down of how a sports massage could benefit each one.
Keep reading more to dive in!
I’ve had a lot to think about
in my experiences both working with PTSD clients and also living and working
through the last year of covid-19 crisis. The following is theory based on
anecdotal data and a lot of scientific reading. Yes I’ve seen it play out with
hundreds of clients but I don’t have the time or resources for a true
scientific study. So I want to make that clear. But I think it’s a useful
paradigm to try out and see what insights it may give us about ourselves and
our stress.
We really like to convince ourselves
that we are very evolved, and in a lot of ways that is true. We build fantastic
machines that perform relative miracles to anything we could conceive of in
primitive times. Intellectually, most of us understand that we need thoughtful
solutions to modern problems. Including working together as a team on projects
that improve our safety and daily lives.
However, a lot of the older
nervous system programming shows up under stress and can cause a reversion to
our less evolved selves.
10,000 years ago, most problems
required a physical solution. Think about pre-tool making. You either gather
fruit and other edible plants, or physically catch, wrestle, and kill your
food. Or both. In order to hunt (or avoid being hunted), you needed three basic
skills: hiding, running, and fighting.
These three skills show up in
all animals as instincts and we are no exception. While most of us have learned
to largely tame them, they still show up in small and medium ways.
DW: I’m going to show a quick foot
retracting exercise that I give to a lot of clients to rehab an old ankle
sprain or to help find better balance in their feet.
Most of us in some point in our life have had an ankle
sprained or two or ten and that causes the ankle almost all the time to roll
outwards this way. You have a compensation that your brain does rather than
leave your foot rolling out sideways because it doesn’t feel right just walking
on the edge. And that is to externally rotate your hip or your knee or both and
that allows the foot to fall more that way.
You’ll see some clients will show you this one foot out
other clients will show you the other and some show both, right? This is really
a long-term compensation for a stuck ankle that never got unstuck. What’s
supposed to happen when you walk is that you roll through the ball of your big
toe when you come forward that way right and that should stay contacting as the
very last thing until you bring your foot forward.
With an old ankle sprain you’ll get some version of this
and that big toe never contacts the floor completely. And so to relearn how to
do that I have a very simple exercise!
Before looking for specific qualities in a
sports massage therapist, it’s helpful to understand what to expect from a
session. Sports massage can comprise any of the manual techniques that a
licensed massage therapist is trained in. These techniques are performed with
the intention of addressing your specific concerns around your active and/or
physically demanding lifestyle.
Often, our athlete clients will come in with
an acute injury they sustained while practicing their activity. Such as an
ankle sprain or a torn rotator cuff. The therapist will then work to help
alleviate pain. Sports massage can decrease inflammation, assist with
proper scar tissue formation, and increase range of motion or stability at the
injured joint.
Other times the concern is minimizing delayed
onset muscle soreness during peak training times for a specific event. Or
promoting recovery after an event like a race or competition. Frequently, an
active person is simply in pain or is having trouble performing at their
desired level. And is looking for someone to help them determine the root cause
of the dysfunction. These are all issues that our staff at Bodyworks DW can
help you tackle.
Great massage therapy in NYC needs to have a solid arsenal of techniques. And tools to be able to create an effective and thorough treatment plan. At Bodyworks DW, we have regular advanced trainings for all of our massage therapists. These trainings are designed to improve each therapist’s skills in assessing the primary sources/reasons for your pain. Our therapists come prepared with a toolbox full of the best deep tissue massage techniques.
Back pain is a prevalent issue addressed by
massage therapists for many of you. Each of your massage needs and cases are
unique. Therefore, each of our treatments are uniquely customized to you. Your
Bodyworks DW massage therapist will carefully consider your symptoms, history,
routine and movement patterns. Then they determine how to provide the most
effective treatment. We are dedicated to finding what will work best for you.
So that you can get back to moving more freely and without pain or discomfort.
We offer back pain massage in Midtown and the Financial District in New
York City. Would you like to schedule a professional massage with one of our
highly trained massage therapists? Contact Bodyworks
DW today or click
on the button to book online at our back pain massage Midtown or back pain
massage Fidi studios!
Read More ..
Competitive triathlete? Long distance runner? Swimmer? Road cyclist or Peloton junkie? At Bodyworks DW, our therapists provide custom-designed sports massage sessions focused on helping you maximize your activities. Sessions can include massage for injury recovery, injury prevention, tune-ups and maintenance. Sports massage for triathletes is hardly a luxury – it’s an investment!
Update April 2021: Massage for triathletes and other endurance sports is especially important right now after months of being indoors! As we all try to restart our exercise routines, we could all use a tune up 🙂
Swimming, biking, running…triathletes are the workhorses of the athletic community. With super long training routines! Two of these three activities are lower body heavy. However, the swimming portion means that your upper body and arms should certainly not be ignored. Great sports massage therapists also understand how important your breath and core are in any of these activities.
We definitely want to address your chief complaints like sore knees and hips. But we also want to get to the root of why you may be continually experiencing soreness. Or why you are starting to feel less refreshed after your runs or swims. This is often where breath and core awareness come into the picture. Sports massage for triathletes focuses on helping them balance the issues that each discipline causes.
Read More… sports massage in NYC
Like a lot of us, I’ve asked my body to keep up with me in ways it might not have expected. I’ve met what seems like every kind of doctor there is searching for answers. I wish my family had gotten me a massage gift card earlier!
Here’s what I was told
by traditional medicine
1.
Stop what you’re doing, it’s stupid. (I’m a
modern/contemporary dancer)
2.
Surgery is the only way to fix this. (surgery, small or large
scale, is invasive and generally the most expensive and time consuming route to
healing)
3.
Wear a hard cast on both feet (???) for two months to reset
them….
BASICALLY, I WAS LEFT LIVING IN PAIN WITH NO WAYS OUT
THAT WORKED FOR ME. I ACCEPTED THIS AS REALITY AND CONTINUED ONWARD. BY LETTING
MY PAIN BECOME THE NORM.
This experience was shared among
my college peers. We ignored our pain. My friends and I didn’t have the time to
research our options or the finances to invest in our bodies. Money was tight
and my shoulders were tighter. It didn’t cross my mind once to ask for help
(typical college student, right??).
So I trucked along silently. If
someone had just validated my pain and set me in the right direction it might
have been a completely different story.
Ahem….a massage
gift card would have been nice.
This blog discusses every detail on how massage therapy can help athletes with sports injuries and shares a focus on massage therapy for injury prevention. We have kept this blog short, precise, understandable, and informative to give you the best insight. Within the first section, we discuss a brief introduction to massage therapy and its relation to sports injury. In the next section, we discuss how massage therapy helps athletes with sports injuries. In the sub-divided section, we discuss each benefit, including better nutrition to muscles, quick recovery time, enhanced muscle flexibility, followed by how it helps to prevent over-training. In the last section, we talk about how massage therapy helps prevent sports injuries in the future. So, let's dig in.
