21st Century Workplace Seated Massage

by | Nov 10, 2012 | Chair Massage, Marketing

This article originally appeared in MASSAGE Magazine‘s October 2012 issue.

From the first days of professional seated massage in the mid 1980s, massage in the workplace has been a significant market segment. When my business was providing chair, or seated, massage at companies such as Apple Computer, the service was clearly positioned as a workstyle benefit that set progressive 20th century businesses apart from their stodgy, suit-and-tie counterparts.

While that motivation still exists and evolved, another trend has emerged, driven by a shift in the health care industry that, if seized upon, has the potential to completely reshape the face of massage and the workplace.

The tradition

For the past three decades, chair massage has ebbed and flowed with the growth and recession cycles of the economy. The high-tech and bio-tech sectors, in particular, typically lead the upswing and provide fertile ground for workplace massage. These companies are often created, managed and staffed by a younger generation more interested in quality of life issues. Benefits such as free meals, childcare, concierge services and massage therapy are often part of benefits packages.

Theresa Crisci, who has been doing workplace chair massage for nearly 20 years in Connecticut, identified a big shift in corporate attitudes over the past two decades “For the most part, we no longer have to worry about sexual harassment issues being a barrier for chair massage in the workplace.” Crisci believes that chair massage actually holds a certain cachet for the current generation of young people in the workforce and the companies who employ them.

Another two decade practitioner, Tom Darilek, owner of Seize the Day Energizing Chair Massage, in Austin, Texas, believes employers consider regular massage to be simply another tool for attracting and retaining top tech talent. Darilek also notes that in the past, while companies occasionally would give lip service to chair massage as a wellness tool, they basically treated it as a fad that would fade as soon as the economy began to tighten.

Now, there are significant signs that the wellness fad may finally be here to stay—and there is every reason to believe that chair massage therapists may benefit.

The revolution

The future of workplace massage is tied to the economics of health care policy. At long last, corporate, governmental and academic policy makers have come to the conclusion that a health care system whose primary focus is sickness care is doomed to bankruptcy. They have concluded the ultimate foundation of an economically viable health care system has to be prevention and wellness.

This radical paradigm shift is stamped indelibly into the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010. While the media and partisan politicians were obsessing about the constitutionality of ObamaCare and its new framework for financing health care, mostly overlooked was the fact that the 954-page ACA legislation specifically “directs the creation of a national prevention and health promotion strategy.”

The law created the National Prevention, Health Promotion, and Public Health Council (National Prevention Council), composed of the heads of 17 Federal agencies and chaired by the Surgeon General. This high-level federal action group works closely with a 25-member Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health, also mandated in the legislation. Both of these groups are developing plans and recommendations that will impact every strata of society, including workplace wellness.

Happily, massage therapy has a seat at the table of this health care revolution. One of the members of the Advisory Group is the esteemed Janet R. Kahn, Ph.D., a 30-year massage professional and the director of research of the Massage Therapy Research Consortium from 2003 to 2008. Her background in massage and integrative health makes her an ideal advocate for the inclusion of massage as these panels refocus the health care system on prevention and health promotion, two areas in which massage excels.

The National Prevention Council and the Advisory Group have already targeted the workplace as one of the primary arenas for implementing this new strategy. I will make the case that seated massage is ideally suited to lead the way in workplace wellness. Then, armed with a clear idea about how to describe and position the unique strengths of chair massage, I will make a few practical suggestions about finding companies ready to hear the message of chair massage.

This might be a good time to note that, while most of the following rationales could also be applied to table massage, the twin barriers of time and money make chair massage a far better fit for the vast majority of workplaces. Experience has shown that, in general, only the very largest companies include the option of table massage in their menu of wellness services.

The prevention intervention

The medical community has traditionally limited prevention to proven clinical screenings—mammograms, colonoscopies, blood pressure screenings, treadmill tests and the like. In the new health care model, prevention also includes dealing with lifestyle and pre-clinical conditions, a particular strength of chair massage.

Seated massage has always been good at preventing little problems from becoming big problems. The reason someone wakes up with a crick in her neck is never because, as she might claim, she “slept wrong.” Rather, it is because of weeks or months of accumulated psychological or physical stress finally reaching a tipping point that resulted in a muscle spasm. Regular chair massage alleviates the results of these minor stresses and prevents muscles from reaching that involuntary contraction threshold.

Too much mental stress is the primary or secondary cause of many medical conditions as well as an inhibitor to healing virtually all injury and disease processes. Most people will agree that high-quality chair massage is an instant stress reducer. While we don’t yet know all the exact mechanisms involved, there is sufficient scientific evidence to support the claim that massage is effective at reducing anxiety and depression.

Human beings were made to move. When employees are immobilized by their jobs at desks and keyboards, their bodies will eventually break down and rebel. The coin of movement has two sides: active movement where people move themselves, which we call exercise, and passive movement where someone else creates the movement, which we call massage. Regular seated massage moves the tissue, which enhances circulation, which lets the body’s own self-healing mechanisms work most efficiently. Neither movement nor circulation is optional and chair massage provides a heaping serving of both.

Immobilized bodies that don’t move result in what Thomas Hanna, the great somatics pioneer, more elegantly termed sensory-motor amnesia. That is to say, chronically contracted muscles which eventually stop giving feedback to the higher cortex of conscious awareness. When this happens we are no longer able to feel the imbalances we have created and we begin to think that our bad posture is normal.

Seated, or chair, massage restores the mind-body connection and we feel better in two important ways: First, we feel the relief of the multi-tiered rebalancing that comes at the end of a massage; second, our capacity for experiencing sensation inside our bodies increases.  We can now feel more and we can feel better. If we are not getting accurate feedback about the state of our health, we see no reason to change. Massage restores that feedback loop and shows us that we have control over how we feel.

This enhanced self-awareness brings us to the second set of rationales for seated massage in the workplace.

Making wellness work

Advocates of wellness and health promotion know in order for the health care paradigm to shift from treatment to prevention, people must be motivated to make significant lifestyle changes.

We have known for decades that five chronic diseases–heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and diabetes–are responsible for more than two-thirds of all deaths in the United States. We also know the progression of all these conditions is heavily influenced by lifestyle. Studies have repeatedly shown we would save billions of health care dollars every year if we ate better, exercised more, reduced chronic stress and didn’t smoke.

So why haven’t we change our lifestyles? Because change requires effort and motivation.

One of the unique aspects of chair massage, unlike any other workplace wellness modality, such as smoking cessation, dietary modification, exercise, Yoga or meditation, is it requires no motivation to change. It works immediately with no effort or intervention required on the part of the recipient. With massage, people also come to realize that they have far more control over how they feel than they ever imagined and thus become more motivated to change.

The frosting on the cake is that chair massage also supports every lifestyle change. No matter where you are on the spectrum of wellness, from couch potato to super athlete, if you want to break a habit, start a new one or support any transition in your life, adding massage will immediately make you feel better and positively reinforce your efforts.

Finally, seated massage is the most egalitarian of all wellness programs. You don’t have to be overweight or a smoker or have high blood pressure or even be stressed out to qualify and benefit from regular massage. The only ultimate contraindication for massage is an individual’s reluctance to be touched.

A major transition

Chair massage in the workplace is at a moment of major transition. In the emerging health care economy the time is right to position yourself as a serious wellness consultant who provides massage services. There has never been a better time to showcase the benefits of massage and create a true health care system, one body at a time.

For further marketing tips, check out Four Ways to Market Workplace Chair Massage.

The Realms of Massage

by | Feb 27, 2012 | Business

The first professional massage I ever received was around 1970 in an old Russian Banya on the near-North Side of Chicago called the Luxor Baths. The clientele was a mix of the old Jewish expats who had moved to the suburbs (Nelson Algren used to hang out here) and the new Hispanic locals. Luxor was an artifact from an earlier time complete with swimming pool, wet and dry saunas, a steam room and metal tables where friends would beat and brush each other with soapy oak leaf brooms.

Luxor also had a massage room and, with some encouragement from my friends, I finally gave massage a try. It was a memorable experience and I have been hooked ever since.

Notably, I didn’t get my first massage because something was wrong with me. I got a massage because it made me feel great and that is the experience I have been seeking to share with the world ever since.

Traditionally, within most cultures, professional massage has operated in two very discreet economic realms: the personal care services industry and the health care industry.

  • As a personal care service, massage is found in saunas, spas, hair salons, in the foot massage services provided in the streets of near- and far-Eastern Asian countries as well as neighborhood bathhouses and as various forms of seated massage now throughout the world. This is the kind of massage I received at the Luxor Baths.
  • In the health care industry, massage evolved through a variety of healing modalities, such as osteopathy and chiropractic, orthopedic practice, nursing and physical therapy (called physiotherapy in many countries).

These two domains were easily distinguished from one another both by terminology (customers vs. patients) and by intention (relaxation vs. treatment) and there was generally little confusion or overlap.

That clarity started to dissolve in the 1970s as a new economic arena began to emerge. It was called “health promotion” or “wellness” and was a reaction to the dominant health care paradigm, which in fact did not focus on health care, but rather sickness care.

The counterculture that emerged from the sixties first manifested this new approach by embracing such practices as natural childbirth, organic and vegetarian diets, supplements and herbs, and varieties of personal growth dubbed the “human potential movement.” Books such as Our Bodies Ourselves began to advocate rejection of the cult of experts in favor of personal responsibility and control. The goal became prevention, not treatment, and creating a balance that integrated the mind, body and spirit into a unified whole.

Inevitably, business began to capitalize on this cultural trend and the fitness industry was born. Health clubs replaced gyms, Nike shoes replaced sneakers, wellness centers replaced spas and self-help programs replaced the confessional. Also about this time, corporate wellness programs started to get a foothold as companies began to suspect that the only way to reduce their ever-rising health care costs was by encouraging employees to maintain good health through proper exercise, diet, and emotional balance.

Massage slipped easily into this new and exciting economic domain. The Esalen Institute in California championed new approaches to massage that focused on mind/body integration as well as a new category called “bodywork” that included innovative modalities developed by Ida Rolf, Milton Trager  and Moshe Feldenkrais.

The advent of this new wellness arena, however, has muddied the once clear distinction between personal care services and health care services as both try to carve for themselves a slice of the wellness pie.

And where has that left the massage industry? Also very muddied. According to the massage schools, associations and regulators, massage is no longer a personal care service, it is a health care service. I can no longer get a massage like I did 40 years ago at the Luxor Baths. Now I have to get massage therapy. But I don’t want a health care massage. I don’t even want a wellness massage. I just want to lie down and bliss out in the hands of someone who makes me feel good. I don’t care if the practitioner has 50 or 500 hours of training. If I like the massage, I will go back. If I don’t, I won’t.

We need to bring back and validate the personal care massage realm. That is where the most growth is happening (chair massage and franchise table massage), that is where the jobs are, and that is where I want to get my massage.

Do you believe massage should reclaim its identity as a personal care service? Does defining massage exclusively as “therapy” confuse the public and needlessly restrict our growth?

Chair Massage: A foundation for fitness

by | Feb 5, 2012 | Chair Massage, Fitness

While I am a big believer in making every moment a fitness moment (see Creating a Fitness Lifestyle), the reality is many people don’t have even the most basic motivation to move to a healthier lifestyle. That’s where chair massage fits in because it not only requires minimal motivation, it actually provides motivation and support for getting off and staying off of the couch.

The reason why I consider chair massage foundational fitness is because, of all the activities that fall into the fitness/wellness category, chair massage is the one that requires the least time and effort, while offering the greatest value. The only motivation required for chair massage is to sit down and do nothing. The chair massage specialist does the rest.

This is one of the most unique and important features of chair massage. All other wellness modalities require high degrees of motivation, practice, support or cost, for example, dieting, exercise, smoking cessation, Yoga, meditation, table massage and Tai Chi.

The foundation of fitness is movement. It is movement that creates circulation in the body/mind and, as I am fond of saying, circulation is not optional. Without good circulation your body and your mind literally wither away and eventually die. Much of what we define as the “aging process” is simply a result of inhibited circulation/movement.

Exercise, which requires a high degree of motivation, is active movement, where you move yourself. Massage is passive movement, where someone else creates the movement/circulation within you and requires minimal motivation.

In addition, over time, as people experience regular massage, they reopen the communication links between their brains and their bodies. That is to say, massage heightens awareness of our internal sensations about what makes us feel good. As a result, recipients tend to become more motivated to lose weight, stop smoking, eat better and even develop a regular exercise program.

As lifestyle changes go, regular chair massage is a great place to start. It triggers the pleasure centers while enhancing circulation. On an ongoing basis it supports all other fitness/wellness activities and lifestyle changes. Each massage rebalances the body/mind by smoothing out the rough edges created by exercise, dieting or withdrawal from smoking and other addictive substances.

Best of all, you don’t have to be overweight or a smoker or in shape or out of shape to benefit from a chair massage. It is the most egalitarian of all wellness modalities and provides a solid foundation for fitness. Given its low cost, chair massage clearly provides the greatest value.

Moving Massage from Acceptability to Accessibility

by | Jan 9, 2012 | Bodywork, Politics

Acceptability-to-Accessibility ImageFor as long as people have been paying for therapeutic massage services, practitioners have feared being mistaken for prostitutes. That fear was the primary driving force that, in 1983, led the American Massage Therapy Association to re-brand “massage” into “massage therapy” in an attempt to define it as the health care profession. [Related article] I call this quest for professional legitimacy the “acceptability” strategy.

Within a decade this strategy was almost universally embraced by massage schools, educators, associations, regulators and vendors serving the industry. It seemed like an obvious strategy and the perfect solution. In point of fact, it was remarkably successful at validating therapeutic massage in the public mindset.

Unlike 20 years ago, nowadays no one blinks twice when a young woman announces her desire to attend massage school–no snickers, no raised eyebrows. The public generally perceives that there is a clear distinction between adult entertainment massage and therapeutic massage. The battle for acceptability has, for the most part, been won.

But now there is another front that needs our attention. What I call the “accessibility” problem.

While we have steadily increased the numbers of people who want a massage, the number of people who actually can get a regular massage has barely budged from less than 5% of the US adult population [see related article]. The reason is painfully simple. Massage therapy is  too expensive.

Since I am writing to a primarily professional audience, let me do a quick reality check. How many readers pay full price for at least one massage every two months? How many of your friends do? If you are at all like the typical massage practitioner in my continuing education classes, you can’t afford to pay $65 for a regular table massage, and neither can your friends. The primary reason people don’t get a massage is because they can’t afford it.

The only two significantly expanding models for massage services are the pay-by-the-month model pioneered by Massage Envy and chair massage in malls delivered by Chinese immigrants. What they both have in common is that they are lowering the price of massage.

Those of you who have experimented with online coupons also know what I am talking about. Discount massage shoppers rarely turn into full price regular customers. The only people who pay full price for regular table massage are the very wealthy, the very fanatical, and the very desperate people in pain.

While turning “massage” into “massage therapy” made our services more acceptable, it did little to make them more accessible. In fact, there is a case to be made that the effort to make massage into a health care profession has actually limited its growth.

Massage as health care

When you define massage as massage therapy in a health care context you are defining it as a treatment. The problem is that most massage is not performed as a health care treatment. Most massage, according to consumer surveys, is done for health promotion and relaxation. That has resulted in a huge disconnect between what massage practitioners think they are selling and the general public is looking to buy.

Massage schools graduates are encouraged to believe that they are training to become a health care professional–sort of junior physical therapist. [Indeed, I just searched “Physical Therapy Training” in Google and one of the three sponsored ads at the top was for a massage school.] But the reality is that the vast majority of graduates, if they are lucky enough to be working at all, will be doing massage, not massage therapy. While it may increase school enrollment to have them think otherwise, it does nothing for their level of frustration when the inner image of practitioners does not jive with their outer experience.

For massage customers, particularly new ones, defining massage as therapy often leads them to believe they have to have something wrong in order to get a massage. Every day that I work in a chair massage studio new customers invariably feel obligated to have a physical problem before they step through the front door.  “I woke up with a pain in my neck/back/shoulder,” being the most common statement.

Massage as personal care or fitness

If we want to make massage truly accessible, we need to recognize the difference between massage as a health care service and massage as a personal care service.

Defining massage as a health care profession only makes sense for that small, highly trained and experienced segment of practitioners that actually performs massage as treatment and for that small fraction of the public that actually needs and wants to pay for that service. Massage therapy should be defined for what it actually is–medical massage–and we should require far more than the standard 500 hours of training. Something closer to 2,300 or 3,000 hours of the Ontario and British Columbia models would be appropriate.

I admit that I am very conservative on the issue of training but, in my experience, 500 or 600 hours of training to become a massage therapist is totally inadequate, does nothing for creating credibility as a health care profession and sets totally unrealistic expectations for massage school graduates, the vast majority of whom will never make even a part-time living doing massage.

“Massage therapy” should never have been defined as entry-level into the profession. It is not. Plain old circulation/relaxation/prevention-oriented “massage” is entry-level. Let students focus on learning how to touch and be touched [Related article].

Massage has always rested comfortably in the personal care services arena along with spas, hair salons and nail studios. Over the past twenty-five years, massage has also grown up with the wellness and fitness industries. These two economic sandboxes are where the majority of massage practitioners should be playing and it is the kind of massage that massage schools should be selling and teaching.

Radically reinventing an industry

Knowing what we now know, if I was creating the U.S. massage industry from scratch, here is how it would be structured:

  • Entry-level into the field should be a 200-hour course in chair massage.
  • Table massage would be a second, optional level of training. Add on another 300-hours to make the current 500-hour standard and have the focus be on training practitioners to be wellness educators as well as table practitioners.
  • Massage Therapy would be true medical massage and require at least a masters level program.

There are some strong arguments for making chair massage entry-level. For the industry, chair massage provides a strong foundation:

  1. Chair massage is what the general public can afford and, because there is no disrobing or private rooms required, is more likely to try.
  2. Because it is affordable, people will get massaged more regularly.
  3. People who have had a chair massage are more likely to consider having a table massage or massage therapy.
  4. The net result will be far more work, more jobs, more successful students, and more sales for chair and table manufacturers.

For the budding massage practitioner, starting with chair massage will eliminate a lot of needless heartache and financial burden:

  1. Since there is really no way of knowing whether you will like doing massage professionally until you get into massage school, a 200-hour tuition mistake is a lot less painful than a 500-hour mistake.
  2. More students will be able to afford to go to massage school without going deep into debt and actually make a living doing upon graduation.
  3. After they are making a living doing chair massage, chair practitioners can save up money to pay for table massage school without taking out loans.
  4. It is easier for entrepreneurs to open chair massage businesses than table massage establishments resulting in more jobs.

The bottom line

Can my ideal industry model become real? Realistically, I doubt it. The massage schools, associations and regulatory agencies are far too entrenched to consider reforming the profession so radically. The quest for acceptability as a health care profession continues to be seen as the primary goal. Too bad. A lot of people just need to feel better through touch.