We all know breathing is important for our health. We've all been told we should be breathing "better." But merely telling your clients to “take a deep breath” is not enough. Instead, this course will show you how to utilize your client’s breath—how to make your massage sessions more effective, and in turn how to improve their own health and happiness. 

Along the way, you’ll learn about how you are breathing as well, since utilizing your own breath more efficiently will make you a happier and healthier therapist, too!

We will see how the breath—and more specifically, our very common “dysfunctional” breathing patterns—are implicated in many (if not all!) of the problems that bring clients into our offices. Nearly all of your clients complain about tension their back and neck and shoulders. And many of your clients are aware of the value of breathing well. But what if these two aspects of good health are more linked than we realize? What most clients don’t realize (and what many of us therapists don’t realize either) is that improving their breath will also lessen their pain. 

This course will explore the breathing patterns endemic to our hurried lives—and the “dysfunctional” or “paradoxical” or just plain effort-full breaths that result. Then we will assess our clients in order to see, and palpate, this epidemic of overuse of the secondary muscles of respiration (the scalenes, SCM, traps, pec major and minor, etc.). I will demonstrate an easy and effective solution: not trying to get the client to breathe better, but instead encouraging the client to breathe easier. We will cultivate the ability to lengthen the exhale, and in turn allow the inhale to happen by itself; the result is that these overused muscles of the upper back and neck can return to neutral, and we can encourage the diaphragm to reclaim its job as the primary mover of respiration. 

To truly be aware of our client’s breath, however, we must be aware of our own breath. So we’ll begin by cultivating an awareness of our own breathing, and then we’ll expand our focus to pay attention to (and work with) our client’s breathing. You’ll learn manual techniques, both in prone and supine, to create more pliability in the rib cage and in those secondary muscles of respiration, as well as simple verbal suggestions to offer the client during your sessions. This combination will allow your clients to move more easily and breathe more easily, so that over time they can become aware of their own breath and learn to breathe without unnecessary effort. Your sessions will become more dynamic, and you'll be able to create meaningful change with less effort—and even feel better in your own body as you help your clients feel better in theirs.