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Part I: Discovering Massage for Greater Health and Happiness
"Okay, contract the quadriceps, especially the rectus femoris, and simultane-
ously pull in the psoas, push off the soleus, shorten the gastrocnemius, and
extend the web of flexors and the tibialis anterior. Now compensate for the
lifted foot by tightening the opposite gluteus maximus and bracing all the
muscles in the lower back, too numerable to mention here. Whoops, that
threw me off, and ... whoa!"
And down he'd go, before even moving one step. In fact, It's much more com-
plex than that for even the simplest of maneuvers, and we'd all be helpless to
try and stand up, sit down, or walk to the refrigerator if we had to think about it.
So how do we do it? Basically, we learn to move one little piece at a time as
we develop during infancy and childhood, laying each chunk of the pattern
down in a movement-memory groove, and then building upon it with the next
movement. That's why you see babies experimenting with things like kicking
their legs out, bobbing their heads around, and bringing small electrical
appliances toward their mouths for examination. Every time they do some
thing successfully and then master it through repetition, they file it away, and
that's one less thing they have to consciously think about next time. Of
course, this is the same procedure that athletes use later in life through their
practice as they gradually layer all the perfect little movements they need
one upon the next until they no longer have to think about it but rather, "Just
do it."
By all of this explanation, I mean to say that muscles don't just flex and con-
tract — they learn. What you're holding in your hands when you massage
someone is conscious matter. In fact, It's your muscles that tell you where
you are in space and time, through special nerve endings embedded in your
muscles known as proprioceptors. I don't want to freak you out with bizarre
sounding anatomical terms, but there are two of these proprioceptors that
are particularly interesting and important, and I want to share them with you.
3 Golgi tendon organs are nerve endings found, strangely enough, in your
tendons. They measure how far any particular tendon has stretched,
how much pressure it's putting on the nearby bone, and if the tendon's
in danger of snapping. It's through these little organs that you are saved
from ripping yourself to shreds and pulling all your muscles and tendons
right off the bone.
3 Muscle spindle cells are found in the center of muscles, what's known as
the "belly," where they perform the important task of constantly commu-
nicating the state of the muscle's contraction and movement back to the
central nervous system. They are basically scouts on the outpost of
your active physical self. Without them, you wouldn't be able to tell
where you were going, how fast, or if you were going at all.
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