Do you ever wonder what Olympic athletes often do right after they finish competing? Many high performance athletes include massage and bodywork in their top 10 or even top three list of favored (or required) post-sports practices.

Hot stuff in a cool place

If you’re watching the 2012 Summer Olympics, you’re seeing the results of a lot of hard labor, years of training and yes, behind the scenes support from over 600 massage therapists, including Michigan based massage therapist, Earl Wenk, seen in the photo at left working on Nick, an Olympic track and field athlete, in the garden of his English host family in London.

Even the horses competing in the Olympics are benefitting from massage.

The reason for all of this massage and bodywork of course is to keep the athletes fit and flexible, which is why the Olympic Games and massage have a history that goes way back to 800 BC.  Athletes today don’t even need to read Greek history to learn why the Ancient Greeks thought massage was so great – massage helps speed up recovery after intensive training, it increases blood flow to the muscles which speeds up the healing process by flushing out metabolic waste and as importantly, massage provides an opportunity for an athlete to maintain a harmonious mind-body balance by relieving stress and tension.

Olympic athlete or weekend warrior?

What if your clients are not Olympic athletes, but rather garden variety amateurs or weekend warriors? Do you make the effort to educate your sports-loving clients about the value of massage as a great complement to training, as a way to avoid injury and to facilitate peak performance?

We checked in with Tools for Touch™ webinar presenter and our massage educator friend, Chuck Duff. Chuck is a certified Thai massage instructor and founder of the Thai Bodywork School of Thai Massage. Since his teaching emphasizes body mechanics, using core energy and sensitivity to the body’s language, we thought he could offer a few tips on how massage can improve sports performance.

Q and A with Chuck Duff

Q: Is Thai Massage compatible with sports massage?  If so, how?

I consider Clinical Thai Bodywork specifically to be the best modality I am aware of for athletes and other high performance individuals. One of my students who is now an instructor in our program is an Olympic level athlete, and was attracted to our program because of our sophisticated approach to muscle dysfunction and rehabilitation. We’ve worked with pro athletes, world class musicians, dancers and others whose livelihood depends on their peak performance. Our students include physical therapists, athletes, athletic trainers, MDs and personal trainers.

Q: Athletes are often told that stretching before and after a workout or training session can contribute to injury prevention. Any thoughts?  Are there effective Thai techniques that massage therapists can teach their clients for self-care?

It’s all about how it’s done. Stretching may be helpful, but some types of stretching could be counterproductive just prior to a performance if the end result is to reduce muscle tone and joint stability. We do not approach stretching as simply increasing range of motion and making muscles long and loose. Working tender points under some stretch, like compression under shortening, is a tool to recruit a larger number of muscle fibers toward healthy muscle function. Done properly, this will help an athlete perform better and prevent the onset of trigger points, muscle pulls and taut fibers that could lead to tendon damage under extreme demand.

Q: What’s so great about Thai bodywork?  Why am I hearing more and more about it?

Thai Massage or Thai Bodywork is a unique and wonderful art that combines compression and stretch in ingenious ways. While Thai massage is hundreds of years old, it has only been exposed to the West in the last 30 years. One of the remarkable properties about the art of Thai bodywork is that it can benefit both the giver and the receiver. Properly trained Thai bodywork practitioners use the core energy of the body rather than strength, and can practice sustainably. We see many students who are practicing massage therapists and are having serious problems with their bodies due to an inefficient, strength-based approach to their work. Thai massage can add many years of life to a career and give the therapist an entirely new direction in their life and their work.

Q: Will I easily be able to learn Thai bodywork if I’m already a practicing MT?  And will I be able to incorporate it into my work?

Over half of our students are practicing massage therapists. Our program is particularly well-suited to beginners, and we build strong foundation in our beginning trainings and DVDs. While Thai massage is quite different than massage, and in a sense is more like assisted yoga, massage therapists have the advantage of knowing the body and the therapeutic relationship. Many of our students incorporate the Thai work along with their western massage, and some transition to exclusively do Thai massage because of its benefits and customer interest.

Q:  What about clients with pain issues related to overuse?

Our program is especially well-suited to students who have or wish to add a therapeutic focus to their work. I developed Clinical Thai Bodywork (CTB), a more targeted approach that uses traditional techniques but is heavily informed by myofascial trigger point therapy and other clinical tools. CTB can produce amazing results even with clients who have severe and longstanding pain issues.

Q: What should I tell clients about Thai bodywork?

The Thai people jovially refer to Thai massage as “lazy man’s yoga”. Clients generally don’t stretch enough, and enjoy the fact that they can get many of the benefits of yoga without being a skilled yoga practitioner. Sometimes, receiving Thai sessions gets clients interested in pursuing yoga and other self-care activities. But it isn’t necessary to be flexible or athletic to enjoy Thai massage — a skilled therapist can suit the work to anyone’s condition. After receiving the work for a few sessions, clients come to realize that it can be highly therapeutic and produce amazing results in relieving pain and dysfunction.

Thai massage has some interesting properties that set it apart from other styles. Clients often drop into a deeply relaxed state, yet when they leave the session generally report feeling energized. While it has a strong stretching component, skilled practitioners suit the stretches to the client’s abilities, and adapt pressure to sensitivity. It should never be experienced as painful or unpleasant.  Thai bodywork can be performed in a way that is therapeutic, relaxing, or both — the focus can be tuned by the practitioner.

Q: What are some common misconceptions about Thai bodywork I should be aware of?

Some people have had experiences in Thailand and elsewhere that lead them to believe that Thai massage is painful or even a little shady. Thai massage is a sophisticated, therapeutic art, and should never be done in a way that is injurious or unethical. Our program is aimed at producing highly professional therapists who can achieve remarkable results in treating pain, stress and dysfunction.

Some people get the impression that Thai bodywork must be hard on the therapist, because we’re often lifting and moving the client in different ways. This is not accurate, although poorly trained practitioners might work in a very inefficient way. We take great care to teach practitioners how to work without undue effort. I have a strong background in Hapkido, a Korean martial art that uses circular motion and qi to great effect. My years studying Hapkido taught me that power and impact results from mobilization of core energy, not strength. We use martial arts principles explicitly in our teaching and it makes a huge difference.

Happy trails (Olympic or not) from Chuck Duff and the At Peace Massage team