what are you thinking?

People always ask me what I think about when I am giving massages. Sometimes I talk to my clients, like the math professor that I worked on two days ago that I talked to about calculus and when children start becoming modest about nudity. (Those two subjects were not linked, by the way.) Usually, however, I am silent so that my clients can fully relax and get lost in the massage.

That leaves me with a lot of free time. I try to be present and focus on my client's body and her energy. Now that I've been doing massage for so long (over six years) that all comes sort of naturally and doesn't require as much conscious thought on my part.

I notice things about my client's muscles like, "her tissue feels gluey like she is dehydrated. I bet she is dehydrated, grrr, I wish my clients drank more water. Their muscles release so much easier when they are hydrated and it makes my job so much easier, plus it makes me look like a better therapist."

Or I will notice things like "there are a lot of knots and trigger points in between her scapulas, that's usually a sign of hypertonic muscles. I bet the subscapularis is tight (move over to that muscle.) Yup, sure enough, hmmmm, I wonder if this is going to be too much pressure for her, I better say something just in case." So then I say something and check in with her and then I continue looking to see if the teres minor and major are tight and work the rotator cuff area, all the while noticing which muscles seem to be getting pulled and which are tight and how the client's body responds to the different techniques and then switch up the techniques if they aren't working.

It seems like a lot to be thinking about, but like I said, it is almost second nature to me now. So getting back to the question, what DO I think about?

Food. And this is true for almost every therapist I talk to. We think about food. What we are going to have for lunch or dinner. What we are going to buy at the store. What we are craving. We think about these things several times during the massages. If guys really think about sex as much as women think about food, then there are some dirty, dirty men out there!

The reason for this post is that yesterday I was thinking about something else. I was noticing my client's underwear. I would say that the vast majority of my clients don't wear underwear. There is nothing wrong with wearing underwear during a massage (I prefer to do it myself) but since a lot of my clients are coming from the steam room or hot tub where they were naked or had a bathing suit on and thus end up with no underwear. On a side note, panties are fine during a massage, but take the dang bra off! It is so hard to give a massage to someone who is wearing a bra because the straps cover the areas that tend to need the most work. And ya know what, nobody cares about your boobs. We don't look at your boobs (which are covered by a sheet anyways.) The only thing that massage therapists notice about your boobs is if there are fake or not. The way you can tell is if the boobs stay pointing directly up to the sky when a client is on her back, then they are fake because normally they fall out to the sides a bit.

Anyways, back to underwear. So if you were going to get a massage, what kind of underwear would you wear? Some people wear thongs, which makes sense because that way you are covering up less skin. I tend to go with more comfy pairs that I don't mind getting oil on (it washes out of cotton a lot better than satin.) But my client yesterday was wearing a pair of really cute red lace underwear. Adorable. Expensive. A little out of the normal for our totally laid back spa. Does she wear super cute underwear like that every day? Did she wear them knowing that other people (like the women in the locker room) would be seeing them? Was it her last clean pair?

That's what I was thinking about during my massage yesterday. That, and if my sister was going to be making stuffed peppers for dinner.