No matter what you’re celebrating today – “Merry Christmas!”, “Happy Holidays!”, “Happy Kwanzaa!”, or even “¡Feliz Navidad!”, we hope you’re having an awesome time with family and friends.? Each one of our team members took a few minutes out of our busy schedules to send you a message. We hope you like it. ❤️ What are you doing this week? Pop…
If you’re not aware of how you use both your feet and hands (applying lubricant, moving sheets or limbs, etc.) then it’s quite possible you aren’t giving your clients the best massage ever.
And that’s our goal. Every. Dang. Time.
You may be amazing in treating your clients with the appropriate pressure and perfect moves, but if everything else isn’t spot on, fuggedaboutit.
From Jiffy Lube to Sheet Shredders, here’s what to look out for:
In this Tuesday Toesday tip, we’ll show you how to add in a delightfully warm pillow to enhance your barefoot or hands-on massage. It’s perfect for the winter or even if you keep air conditioning running in your massage room year ’round. Items needed (in addition to your massage table and all that jazz): ❀ an inexpensive heating pad. I actually…
Jeni and Mary-Claire did a podcast earlier in the year with Allissa of Massage Business Blueprint entitled, “What to Know Before Taking a Massage CE Class” (episode 147). In it, we covered many important things to know before signing up for any massage class.
Today, I’m going to mention some specifically relating to our ashiatsu classes (we can go on and on ad nauseam on the subject in general.) 😉
Before you sign up for our barefoot massage class, understand basic yet important need-to-know items such as:
❀ What are your goals for learning barefoot massage? We don’t want you 2 feet deep into class before you realize that your client base (or target clientele) won’t want deep tissue barefoot massage. If you want to work (or do work already) on athletes or deep tissue clients, then perfect!
❀ Do you have health issues? Can you receive deep tissue compressive massage? You’ll be receiving a lot in our classes- 2 + hours for each of the 1st 2 days.
Topical allergies? Please let us know ahead of time. We don’t want you breaking out due to someone’s detergent or foot cleaner.
Last month at the 2018 World Massage Festival in Las Vegas, we taught the biggest ashiatsu class on record!
We had almost 100 massage therapists (93, to be exact) sign up for a full day of training in our HandsFree Ashiatsu class at the World Massage Festival. Five of our FasciAshi instructors traveled from across the country to meet up for a feet-up just off the Vegas Strip. Jeni Spring, Mary-Claire Fredette, Julie Marciniak, Dawn Dotsonand Sara Newberry joined forces and shared little samples of what it takes to be a Barefoot Massage Therapist.
I personally charge the same for everything I do at my office. I’ve never thought that anyone should have to pay more because their body needed a different kind of work (ie. charging more for deep tissue massage). I add on aromatherapy sometimes, and sometimes there’s…whatever I come up with. That’s my gig.
Adding on services or a modality to your massage is totally fine, but if you charge, you better let your client know ahead of time it will cost more.
(Heck yeah, I’d pay extra for an Aroma-nap after a massage. As long as I knew there was a fee first. Putting on your menu or online would be a fab idea.)
I worked on a client today who had just come back from vacation. As I work on him every week, he got a massage while he was gone. It was hands-on, but that was all that was available.
The therapist told him that it wouldn’t be as deep as barefoot massage, and he was ok with that. Because he told her he sees someone who’s been a massage therapist for 20 years and has been teaching for ages, she got a little worried about what he was expecting.
If you are a barefoot therapist who wears fingerless gloves to work in, I have a suggestion for you. Ditch them. If you need to wear gloves while you are doing one-footed strokes, you’re working too hard. In fact, you really don’t need them for 2-footed strokes either. The truth is that if you need to protect your hands from…
Do you remember the Hans Christen Anderson story the Princess and the Pea? This story is, some would say, about the dangers of jumping to conclusions without all the facts. Others believe that it’s about presenting yourself honestly despite how you may appear. In the tale, the old queen, upon seeing the bedraggled girl, needed to prove that she was a…
Pretty much everyone knows that the career-span of a massage therapist is not great. Some sources say 3-5 years, others say 4-6. We burn out and/or hurt ourselves. Then we typically do one of 5 things:
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quit
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do massage part time and another job full time
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specialize in “lighter” work
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teach
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learn barefoot massage so we can do deeper work.
3.5 years into doing traditional hands-on massage, I had the usual complaints-mine were pain in my left wrist and tendonitis in my right elbow.
Years earlier, I had actually climbed up onto a table and placed my knees in a client’s bum and proceeded to actually massage with my hands all over her back. Yup. That’s not a “thing”. That’s a bit weird. (She did love it, though!)
When I found a barefoot massage, that was my “aha!” moment.
So barefoot massage was my gig for a very long time. Because I tend to be a rule follower, I did the moves I was taught. If I couldn’t work a muscle a way that I needed to, I’d invent something else.
Happy Star Wars Day! Today Mary-Claire is going to tell you about how your barefoot massage training is like Star Wars. Seriously. (Don’t miss todays Foot Note Quote on Instagram from Jeni, and her take on Star Wars and FasciAshi!) Going back to the good old days of young Luke Skywalker, you know from the beginning that his life is…