How to Protect Your Thumbs while doing Bodywork
– Let’s face it – the thumb and fingers are excellent bodyworking tools. Approximately 17,000 mechanoreceptors (receptors that respond to sensations of touch) reside in each hand, with the majority clustered in your fingertips.
According to new research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the nerve endings in your fingertips can perform complex neural computations that were previously thought to only be carried out by the brain.
That’s why you can sense subtle changes in the myofascial tissue at the superficial AND deeper levels with your thumb and fingers, as we do in the Direct-Indirect Techniques. This level of sensitivity can be learned through proper training and lots of practice.
Many instructors these days teach techniques that are designed to encourage you to NOT use your thumbs and fingers. They focus on using forearms, elbows, knuckles, various tools, and feet. These techniques can work great in a bodywork session, and I use some of them a lot.
However, unless you’ve already blown out your thumbs, fingers, or wrist, you can use these excellent bodywork tools with great success, if you know what to do and what not to do. They have much more sensitivity than all those other tools put together.
This video from the ROLMT Body Dynamics Mastery online course shows you how best to work with your thumbs during a bodywork session. It also shows what NOT to do with your thumbs, so that you don’t hurt yourself to the point of not being able to work anymore.
The five movements the thumb is designed to do are flexion, extension, abduction, adduction, and opposition. Opposition is where you can bring your thumb over to your little finger. Having an opposable thumb is unique to certain primates like us, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and certain other animals.
So, we know what our thumbs are designed to do. But how do bodyworkers typically use their thumbs?
Hyper-extension – with Load (pressure) – and rotation.
There are several problems with that.
First, the thumb is NOT designed to do rotation! Yes, as you do all the actions it is designed to do in succession, it seems like it’s rotating. But it’s really not. It’s a little like the neck. You can flex, laterally flex to the left, extend, and laterally flex your neck to the right over and over. But it’s still not “rotation”. And doing that regularly over a period of years can be harmful. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced this myself.
Also, hyper-extension with load, combined with “rotation” can slowly over-stretch the ligaments in the thumb and hand. Ligaments are not extensible like muscles, tendons, and fascia. When you overstretch a ligament beyond its natural steady state, it is not designed to come back to where it was when the stretch is done. This can cause hypermobile joints and chronic pain, as many athletes and weekend warriors can attest to.
There are many cases of bodyworkers that “blew out” their thumbs by not using them properly, causing many to have to make the difficult decision to change careers. They just couldn’t do massage work anymore! That meant they couldn’t help people in that way anymore, and that’s one of the main reasons they got into the profession in the first place.
How can you use your thumbs successfully while protecting them from long-lasting damage?
– Keep the thumb bones aligned with radial bone.
– Support the thumb with the other fingers right up against the thumb, while spreading the load into the tissue.
– Vary your strokes – I can’t emphasize this enough. I’ll show more about this in a later video.
– When you feel pain, instantly do something different! You don’t have to “work through the pain”, like athletes tend to do.
Please, don’t stay with a technique that hurts or is uncomfortable just because it’s working and the myofascial tissue is responding well. In other words, don’t be a “suffering super-nurturer”, if you want to keep helping people for a long time to come in your successful bodywork practice.
By the way, if you’re looking for excellent online CE courses that include professionally produced training videos, check out the Ray of Light Training online classes here:
Ray of Light Training Online Courses
Let me know what you think of this post.
Stay well, John
Ray of Light Training
Member of the Fascia Research Society
John J. Ray is a Board Approved Continuing Education Provider through the NCBTMB