If you’ve never heard of it before, Muscle Phasing takes the guess work out of bodywork.
Maybe it’s overconfidence to say it, but I think that Muscle Phasing is likely the best upgrade that the bodywork field will experience in the next 50 years. Massage Therapy, Chiropractic, Physical Therapy, all of them share the space of working with soft tissue. Soft tissue, if you’ve lived, always has some area that could use some maintenance- which often appears as pain, soreness, or lack of full range flexibility. The lens of Muscle Phasing is the best for finding exactly where to work to let the body return to its closest to perfect form.
Instead of trying to aim for what are consciously the most painful spots, Muscle Phasing bypasses the subjective, and goes straight for the objective. We can often get caught up working on what seems like the most obvious targets- where pain is most prevalent. I’m here to say that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, and that our efforts are best spent looking at the whole thing, where we might see more efficient places to put our focus on reducing the “problem” by taking off large blocks of it quickly and methodically. Instead of chipping away at the top of the iceberg, large parts of the nervous system disengage with the pattern as key pieces are dissolved, and no longer behave the same- falling back into order, which feels like freedom, lightness, and relief.
Muscle Phasing takes into account the neurological reality that we’re only conscious of the top 3%-6% of our pain. If there are little buttons holding together a pattern of dysfunction, then maybe instead of trying to go for the top, we go for those little pieces that hold the whole thing together at its roots. If we could see beneath the “water” of our unconscious brain and assess the structural integrity of the main mass of our discomforts, we’d find out that the ones we’re conscious of are held in place by a hundred little places where fascia or tendons have gotten overworked and are structurally at their limit. With incredible efficiency, the body automatically does the least necessary to resolve the stability issues, and glues some of those sinews in place with temporary bonding material, often a calcium clamp, to hold until natural healing returns the integrity of the structure.
The problem we often experience is that we have less and less blood flow when we have less and less movement. This is a problem for organs, muscles, fascia- all of it. The lack of movement is followed by a lack of blood flow. The lack of blood flow is followed by a lack of building materials to repair the tissues. The tissues being in disrepair causes pain, and the story repeats until we’ve amassed an area we call a “knot.” Often these “knots” are stubborn, and are really only happy for a little while after being worked on. They like getting the attention- a donation of blood finally arrives after being mechanically pumped past the restrictions. Those “knots” however often return days after getting their one time payoff of nutrient rich blood. The underlying pattern usually takes more points of influence to change than just the one piece being addressed. What we need is a cascade of positive changes- enter Muscle Phasing.
How does Muscle Phasing solve this issue? Said simply: the nervous system. Just because the nervous system leaves a lot unsaid about these hidden pain spots, doesn’t mean we can’t still leverage the nervous system itself to solve the hidden problem. Muscle Phasing is born from a mixing of intelligent bodywork and some of the fantastic findings of Kinesiology (the study of function in movement.) Chiropractors get to do a lot of learning on some pretty helpful subjects- if we could take pieces of what they use on the daily with the nervous system and applied it to soft tissue work… well we’d almost certainly have a powerful upgrade. Well… that actually is what happened to make this astoundingly effective way of doing bodywork.
I’m going to do some “Name Drops” to avoid a long and detailed story. Alan Beerdahl is one DC (Doctor of Cause) Chiropractor who added more to the Applied Kinesiology body assessment toolkit. His work influenced the work of Dr. Loren Stockton, who was connected to a researcher- Rick Johnson, who learned Massage Therapy from Sister Rosalind, where then Rick Johnson taught Jon Thompson, who then taught me. Alan Beerdahl’s influence is where we get the “Phasing” part from. The Phasing is important because it identifies the responses of specific muscles and establishes a working relationship with the function of the nervous system through restoring communication between proprioception and nociception- how the body feels pain, interrupts movement, and reboots or reassesses.
Essentially we coopt the super computer, that isn’t telling our conscious mind about the tiny pain all over our bodies, to show a sign of some sort that tells us where to work on the body to best improve the overall function and flow of our bodies’ dynamic movement. Those signs are as simple as weak movement, shakiness, or slow action. We not only physically affect the area that’s been compromised, but we also activate the body’s healing by stirring up the blood and removing the restrictions that prevent further healing and proper movement.
In the end, we’re left with a highly efficient, simple to follow, time effective, (brain) supercomputer leveraged type of bodywork. This upgrade in touch therapies saves the client from more time spent in pain, saves them money on their body maintenance, and can possibly alter the course of healing to potentially avoiding surgeries. If we put this ability into even half of the massage adjacent people in the health and wellness field, we would make such a powerful difference in the world. Using this method we can unlock the body’s potential, releasing cascades of lasting change, revealing and releasing the people hidden under mountains of frozen pain.
