Boot Camp

Super workouts like boot camp or “insane” sessions are all the rage, and I must say they have been great for the massage therapy business. Not so great for some people taking the workouts, of course, but great for the schedule book.

           

I have seen more rotator problems in the past few weeks, as people’s dedicated workouts have borne fruit. The big problems: rotator cuffs and lateral rotators. These are the little muscles who are supposed to be helping with aim and alignment and have unfortunately become the front line muscles in the insane workouts.

These little Napoleon’s  like to do it all – and my personal theory is that for people who are bound and determined to do these camp sessions, they are the first muscles to go over the falls in a barrel, so to speak. Mangling metaphors!

One nice lady had lost 15 pounds and found her thumb and forefinger tingling and numb. On both hands. Her workout included dead lifts, not something a 50-something should do without an ambulance nearby.

I’ve never been one to automatically think it is C6, as my friend therapists like to tell me, so I went hunting for the muscles. Right in the middle of the sideline massage, there they were. Both tereses and the infraspinatus felt like granite. The lazy lats were clear. After a good bit of gentle massage that included the serrate, her tingles had cleared out.

My other client example is a fellow who came in looking like he had never missed lifting a heavy barbell, kind of like some of us folks never miss a meal. Until he came in my theory that the boot camps were only frying us couch potatoes. Oh heck no.

These scalenes were down and out in Orange County. Oh my. They eventually relaxed and started to feel like muscles again. Thank heaven for trigger point massage. His big beef, though, was a definite sciatic-like pain in the glutes. Not true sciatic (has anyone ever seen one?) but referral from the over-powered quadratus lumborums.

So are all these workouts bad for people? I don’t think they are bad for everyone, just the unprepared. Folks always want to go for a challenge. To make up with intensity what they have lacked in habit. Just like all of us, I suppose, they expect any bad stuff to peel off in one massage, too.

Plus, I don’t see everyone who has been to booty camp, just the wounded. For some people, the ever-faithful rotators will try to do all the work the lats and glutes should be doing.

Instead of boot camp, perhaps it should be called the Massage Therapists Full Employment Camp.