Are you interested in “how did you get there?” stories from massage pros, educators and practitioners? The massage community is diverse and we each possess personal experiences that are instructive, inspiring – and entertaining.

Elaine Calenda

A massage educator for over 30 years,  Elaine was the Academic Dean at the Boulder College of Massage Therapy where she taught Sports, Orthopedic, and Medical Massage.  Elaine’s Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD is a popular instructional video program in our At Peace Massage DVD store. Elaine was also a presenter at our first Tools for Touch CE webinar in 2011. Although Elaine lost her battle with cancer in 2012, we will never forget her – her sometimes sassy irreverence and sense of humor, her pioneering role as a massage educator and her dedication to advancing the practice of massage therapy.

Q: Elaine, how did you get started?

Well I used to massage my father’s neck, and my mom’s feet and my brother’s back. All our friends used to come over and weight lift because we had weights in our basement and so I just got into working on people.  I can’t tell you how many people I have interviewed the last two months, maybe about twenty people and I think about fifteen of those people said, when I asked them the same question, that ‘well I’ve always been natural at it, I have a knack for it’.

I think a good percentage of people who go into massage have that sort of knack for it, using their hands that way. And people have told them so they get the bright idea of making a living out of it. So that really started it,but then, my brother gave me a newspaper clipping from the New York Times about the Swedish Institute, which is a massage school in New York City and that’s where I went right out of high school. So this is all I’ve ever done and I’m still having fun with it.

Q: Any bumps in the road after school? Any inspirations?

Inspiration? I wanted to go move to San Juan, Puerto Rico where I had relatives working in spas and hotels! I loved Puerto Rico. So I started working in the big fancy hotels there. I got jobs right away with my impressive diploma from New York and I sat in an air-conditioned room day after day waiting for people to come in. I was bored and I didn’t last but three months before going back to New York.

Then I got a job with a dance doctor who specialized in dance therapy. Every day, dancers, little broken dancers would come in from the American Ballet Theatre, from Broadway shows, and we would put them back together.  We got good tickets to a lot of good shows.  Even today, that’s something I specialize in — the lower extremities, the legs feet, alignment.  It moved up in later years to all kinds of orthopedic ailments, including frozen shoulder.

Q: How did this evolve into becoming a massage educator?

A couple of years after I graduated, I started teaching at the Swedish Institute, so I’ve been teaching for close to 30 years. And I love it, you captivate the body, they can’t smoke, they can’t heckle you, they can’t leave the room, so it’s great.  People always say ‘Elaine why don’t you become a stand up comic’ and I think ‘why do I need to perform in those stinky places?’ and have people heckle me and not be able to feel them.  So it’s really a control trip here.

Q: You use humor as a tool to help people learn and remember things.  We love your Julia Child send up in the Studio B  video clip on your Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD . . .

Yeah, that’s for sure.  I always enjoyed teachers who made me laugh and let us laugh, at ourselves and at them and just didn’t take life too seriously because that’s when I think you really start tightening up, our muscles tighten up.

When students laugh, and they laugh a lot in my classroom, I think their recall of techniques improves.  They’ll call me three, four years later and say ‘Elaine, I still use those techniques you showed me’ and that’s the biggest compliment I can get.  They are really out there making it work, making people feel better.

Q: Your Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD program provides a lot of ‘positioning the client tips’.  Does this produce better recovery?

Yes, clients regain mobility a lot quicker than with the standard pro-pine position.  Seeing this gave me the confidence to move out of two-dimensional ways of treating people and really get into 3D rotation techniques.  That’s what gave it the edge that it really needed.

Q: And you feature a real frozen shoulder client in the DVD?

I think it’s important to have a live model to demonstrate with, someone who can tell their story to make it real. She fell off a ski lift that was coming in and fractured her shoulder so she had a pretty bad stiff joint. Also, to give people hope that no matter where they are in their life, they can get better through massage therapy.

Q: The clinical name for Frozen Shoulder Syndrome is Adhesive Capsulitis? Is that scar tissue?

Scar tissue is created from a fracture swelling that hardens. It also comes from fear that’s locked into the muscle. We demonstrate resistance exercises on the DVD. Doing those over and over helps the body to understand that it is no longer in trouble.

A big part of frozen shoulder rehabilitation involves taking something called the shrug mechanism that locks the shoulder up and in to the socket AND splinting which holds a part of the body close to the center.  Shrugging and splinting are the hardest things to treat.  The fracture heals, the person becomes more mobile but what often remains is a holding pattern that sinks way down into the sub-conscious. That’s the hard part to treat because you’ve got to convince the body that it’s okay.  And it takes a lot of convincing.

That’s another reason why this Frozen Shoulder DVD instructional program is a good idea, not just for massage therapists but also for physical therapists and chiropractors.

Elaine Calenda’s Frozen Shoulder Syndrome DVD program is NCBTMB approved for 4 contact hours of approved CE credits. Visit the product page to read review, learn more and purchase.