Ultra Specific Deep Tissue Massage for all injury & chronic pain conditions: Mick McCleary

A little bit about fascia. Might just explain why it is so important.

12/6/2013

Tom Myers (author of Anatomy trains) says`.

“Small kinks in myofascial force transmission such as those

provided by scars or adhesions have surprising functional

consequences, often at some distance from the site”

Myofascia , Connective Tissue, ECM (call it what you want)

What is it and what does it do?
- binds cells into tissue, tissue into organs, organs into systems.

-       attaches muscles to tendons and binds tendons to bones, ties bones to bones to form joints.

-       wraps every nerve and every vessel.

-       laces all internal structures firmly into place and envelops the body as a whole.

-       Is continuous through all these processes (NB: every part of the body is connected to every other part by virtue of this Connective Tissue network!!!!!)

-       gives muscles their shapes

- stops muscles from bursting as it can withstand up to 2000psi. (you put about 30psi in car tyres!)

-       allows muscles to slide past one another

-       has 10 times more sensory neurons than your muscles

It also has many properties: It can:-

- be stronger than steel wire –tendons and ligaments

- be as transparent as glass – cornea of eye

- have the toughness of leather

- have the tenacity of glue

- have the viscosity of gelatin

If you add Hyaline (nylon like substance) then it becomes various forms of cartilage

If you add mineral salts it becomes bone

IT IS THE MAJOR REPAIR MECHANISM IN THE BODY!

-       It’s chemistry monitors the inflammatory response

-       it’s fluids deliver the antibodies and white blood cells to fight infections

-       and its Fibroblast's produce fresh collagen to close a wound or fracture with new scar tissue.

It is constantly changing through our lives. It dissolves, hardens, changes shape, size and consistency depending what pressures are applied or injuries have occurred.

Remember that 'Form Follows Function' If you hunch over a keyboard for years then that is the shape your body will form to.Your fascia and muscles will shorten in front and lengthen in the back.

How can it possibly do all this.

Because it is like a gel and just like jelly that can be liquid when heated on a stove it can also be impossible to put a knife in if left at the back of the fridge for a few weeks.

As we age the Fascia’s collagen fibres pack closer together especially in areas of most compression or strain. So it continues to thicken, becomes more rigid, loses Range Of Motion and starts to impose limitations on the movement of your body as a whole. Yip that's what it does.

Anyone who doesn't agree is probably too young or maybe lucky and genetically gifted in some way.

Hmmm. Sounds important. Damn right it is. So look after it. Keep it hydrated, stay out of hot water, away from heat packs, stretch as much as you train, keep moving your body through life, work the muscles that help keep this system healthy and importantly ensure you don't have pain hidden within this system.

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Hidden Pain. What is it and how does it relate to stress?

5/24/2013

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    Pain is without doubt the least understood of all the human senses. It's primary function is to alert the Central Nervous System to damage or destruction in the body's tissues.
    Pain is nearly always caused by a physical or psychological threat hence the body responds almost identically as it does to the' flight of fight' response otherwise known as stress. It increases mental alertness, muscle tone, heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, and facilitates clotting factor, shunts blood to the skeletal muscles, dilates the pupils and causes sweating in extreme cases. We are all very aware of how stress is very bad for our health...therefore so is pain!!!!
    The 'flight or fight' response can in itself be a threat to an individual if it is triggered to easily, too often, and sustained for too long. So if you have continual chronic or acute pain in your body, then this also becomes a threat to our health.
    Here is a little known fact. You can have pain in your body but not be 'consciously' aware of it at all times. Your body has an amazing inbuilt survival mechanism that can allow you to ignore your pain so that you can continue to function. It does this via what is known as Sensory Engrams. So what is an Engram? It is basically a learned behavioural or movement pattern. Something that we can recall and repeat when required. For instance. Signing your name. You can sit at a desk with a pen or you can stand at a blackboard with a piece of chalk. Even though you use larger muscles for the blackboard signature the results look the same. So what if you tried to do a movement, such as a squat or running, but had an injury somewhere along the initial movement pathway. So instead of the necessary activation of required muscles following, for example, a clink, clink, clink, clink, clink - job done effect, you get a clink, clink, clink, clunk - ouch!!! Oops we hit a piece of muscle or fascia that is in pain due to injury. If you continue on and try to ignore this pain your body will do what it does in the signature example and use different muscles to accomplish the same movement.Why? Because your body does not like pain!!! So your pain is hidden as you have a new compensation pattern in use. Your body will then try to tell you the pain is still there by transferring it to the joint above or below, but on the opposite side of the limb/body. It will continue this process until the muscles get more and more painful and you get less and less use of them (this is another form of referred pain). Hence your functionality, strength, flexibility and performance all drop. This hidden pain will come back to bite you at some stage somewhere else. An injury to a toe or old shinsplints can affect knees, hamstrings, hips etc. Fingers and wrists can affect elbows, shoulders, necks etc. These can all turn into Chronic Pain syndromes which can, eventually, drastically affect our health if the original injury was extremely damaging and painful. Car accidents and major falls especially. Another hidden one (and unfortunately for some women not so hidden) is Chronic Pelvic Pain. This a major problem usually treated in teenage years by being put on the contraceptive pill and spending a few days each month with a heat pack trying to stave off headaches, pelvic pain and a multitude of other undiagnosed symptons.
    Now recall back to the start of this blog (yes it's a bit long). Remember pain reacts the same as stress in the body. Hence if you have hidden pain, your adrenals are always firing, your cortisol is always high, your thyroid may burn out, you may suffer from adrenal/chronic fatigue, your muscles are always in a toned state. Try holding a book out horizontally with your arm forever. You can't, so your muscles get tired and sore. Oh great more pain. It's a viscious circle. I always say. try to find the cause to your pain. Don't ignore your pain. Let things heal or get them treated asap.You'll do yourself a big favour. Read Job's Body by Deane Juhan if you want even more knowledge on this topic.

Chronic Pelvic Pain

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The most unique and innovative Personal Training and Rehabilitation equipment in UK. The Bodywall Training System

10/25/2012

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Come and use the most innovative and unique training technology in UK to gain strength, get fit, stretch and lose weight on the Bodywall in Thame - and best of all, soothe those body pain and injuries!

The Bodywall training system can be tailored to suit all fitness levels. At your initial session we will guide you through a questionnaire that will let us know exactly how to help you get the most benefit from your sessions and best meet your specific fitness goals.

The Bodywall system works because our patented technology can safely and firmly secure you in a huge range of positions and replicate the loads you get from doing the things you do in your normal daily life from lifting a toddler or a heavy load right up to high level athletic competition. The difference is we can do it over and over again for minutes at a time instead of a few seconds this lets us train you for exactly what is you do at loads well above what you need. This ensures you correctly recruit and then train the actual muscles you need to get the job done whether thats pulling weeds lifting up kids or traing for Olympic competition.

If you're passionate about having and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, then come and join us, and work your body in ways you never thought imaginable!

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The 'Magic Stick'

5/26/2012

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This is an email I got from a client regarding her treatment and the bodytool. Brigitte is a former Australian BMX Champion and flew down from Brisbane for the day due to an ongoing back injury she had been carrying for over a year.

Hi Mick and Chris,

So sorry I haven't got back to you sooner. Im feeling great!! Definitely felt a little beaten up the following day after the treatment. Really only in my calves and my belly button but I was expecting that.

I have renamed the 'Bodytool' to my 'Magic Stick'. I LOVE it! I have been treating myself a little bit every day and my back is feeling amazing. It hasn't felt this good in a year. It used to always be in the back of my head as a source of pain now if I do feel a little bit of tightness its so easy to rub out with the Magic Stick. Im really surprised at how easily I can treat pretty much the entire length of my spine with the tool, which is in my opinion a huge advantage cause you can target the exact source of pain and apply pressure accordingly. All the fascial adhesions through my thoracic spine are gone which I think has given me a huge amount of relief. I have found it really useful in releasing TFL, which was super tight on me and normally quite a hard muscle to release. You can really target TFL with the tool and I think this also helps take the pressure off my back. I have worked out how to release my psoas which is feeling really good. No more hot showers or heat packs :)

Thank you so much for the treatment and the 'Bodytool'! I feel amazing and really value the fact that I have this special little tool that I can use any wear, any time to get relief when I need it.

Thanks again,
Brigitte

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1 Year on. Happy Birthday BodywallNorthShore.

4/3/2012

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Well. Tomorrow 4th April will be BodywallNorthshore's first anniversary. It's been a great first year with many clients enjoying the unique benefits that only The Bodywall can provide. Extra fitness and much greater flexiblity that lasts. When combined with some Bodytool treatments the results are even more staggering. I've found that most flexibility issues have nothing to do with the actual muscle but more to do with fascial adhesions and scar tissue that restrict movement. Once these are removed properly then range of motion improves instantly. Am certainly looking forward to this year. Chris Toal is here on 23rd April for 3 days to further my training with Bodytool treatments. This is an incredible soft tissue treatment technique and we now get referrals from local chiropractors and doctors.
The uniqueness of both the Bodywall and Bodytool means there is little hard literature to read but the results speak for themselves. Once you understand pain, how your body reacts to it, hides it, pushes it around etc and how this goes on to debilitate you in many different ways then you will understand the true benefits of this treatment and training. Feel young again. People (including me 1 year ago) think when you get to a certain age that you have to just put up and live with some pain. This is not true!!!!!! My 3 year chronic achilles problem has gone. Elbow pain...Gone! Shoulder niggles...Gone! Knee pain...Gone! Sore feet in the morning...Gone! I think you get it. We are all going to age. We can't stop that. But it doesn't mean we have to age with pain in our bodies. Get your life back so you can return to or continue to do the things you love in life. Here's to a pain free future.

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What is the Bodytool, Pain Management and how does it work?

9/12/2011

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People keep asking me what is the Bodytool, how do I use it and how does it work? I’ll try to explain this and pain management in the simplest terms possible.

What is the Bodytool?

It’s a massage instrument featuring 2 stones measured between 6.8-7.2 on the Mohs scale. This rates hardness of stone. Diamonds are 10. Quartz and greenstone are used. The greenstone is used for the hard Myofascial adhesions and scar tissue and quartz more for recovery and healing. The stones are harder than any tissue in the human body. Therefore you can glide around and through muscle tissue easily until you come across something that is not quite right. If you come across this you then use the Bodytool to work out the problem within the tissue. Yes, sometimes this really does hurt. But as soon as you stop working the tissue the pain instantly stops. If you do not come across anything that does not feel right then you just carry on to other parts of the body.

Most people seem to have some constant niggling injury that just never seems to go away or that keeps coming back. Why does this happen? Okay. Let’s picture your entire body encased in a Spiderman suit, or a full body stocking. Head to toe. Now what happens as we travel through life. Twisted ankles, shin splints, cuts, bruises, fingers in doors, dislocated shoulders, broken bones, dead legs, car accidents, falls off bikes, out of trees, burns, surgeries….well I could go on and on. I think you get what I mean. So now at each one of those sites of injury grab your Spiderman suit or stocking, pull a bit of it away from your skin, twist it and put a rubber band around that area. Keep doing this until you have done this at every site of injury in your lifetime. Now try to get a picture of how your suit/stocking has been pulled out of shape. Look at the tension lines around the different areas of your body. Picture a spider’s web with one side pulled outwards. Look how it distorts the shape. This is what happens to your body. Then we continue to run, lift weights, do Pilates / yoga, play sport etc and wonder why suddenly our knee hurts, or our elbow, our wrist, our shoulder, our back, our neck etc. The muscles around, above, and below these sites of pain are under constant tension so eventually something has to give.

Also. In the womb at 6.5 weeks old the foetus develops the sense of touch. From then on it develops patterns of muscle behaviour called "engrams". We use them to stand up and sit down, even to stand in ways that express who and what we like and don't like. For example when we say someone is a pain in the neck they usually really are, that's why we say it. We use the same system to avoid moving in ways that touch off pain responses.In doing this we run a very real risk that eventually we will turn our pain recognition systems off altogether so the pain and the surrounding tissue goes numb. However the pain doesn't just go away. It tries another way to get your attention by referring the pain somewhere else, and we end up with less and less use of our hands necks, muscles, limbs, jaws, lungs. . . . the list goes on. Familiar?

What if those rubber bands could be released and our body returns to its proper shape. What if the adhesions between muscles and tissue that restrict our movement and flexibility could be broken down. What if your muscles could return to be nice soft, pliable and springy like they are supposed to be. Not hard, tight and in agony. How can a shoulder or elbow ever truly heal if there is constant tension from a former broken wrist that never gets released. You may get relief for a short period but it will eventually return or even manifest itself at another area of your body.

So this is what I do. I perform a body audit where I map out your major sites of injury, adhesions, scar tissue, scars, and pain. Then from fingers and toes start exposing them to your brain so that your body can then heal itself.

If you know of anyone with ageless injuries or who forever seems to be in some form of pain then get them to contact me.

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Heat. The Enemy of Recovery!

6/7/2011

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Heat, the enemy of recovery!

Myofascial pain is recognised today as one of the most common causes of musculo- skeletal pain. By understanding more about fascia and how it works, you will understand why certain injuries happen, and keep happening. So it will be easier for you to get the best out of your body, recover faster and stop injuring and re injuring yourself.

Fascia is important.

It has properties that let you use it for lots of tasks. Fascia is a gel so it can be liquid like jelly on the stove, or like jelly that’s been forgotten in the back of the refrigerator for a few weeks, so hard that you can’t get a knife into it.

It’s the tough outer skin of the muscle, (the muscle sheath) it’s also the glue that glues muscles tendons and ligament to bone, plus it’s the slimy stuff that lets muscles slide past each other when you’re using them.

If you’ve ever wondered what stops weightlifters muscles from bursting when they lift those hundreds of kilo’s or why your muscles form the shapes they do? It’s this tough stuff called myofascia.

For shortening recovery times and reducing injury one of the most useful techniques is helping you to understand that being nice to your Myofascia is essential to injury recovery and why fascia hates heat.

Fascia also combines with Collagen reinforcing strands to form a fabric that has a tensile strength 10 times that of steel. Because it can withstand up to 140 kg/cm2 of pressure the body uses Fascia to surround and protect all your organs and muscles. By comparison car tyres inflate to around 2 kg/cm2. Fascia is strong enough to crush bone and running or jumping on cold fascia is a major contributor to shin splints and many other stress fractures.
By learning to work with fascia, you will rehab faster and have lots more energy for the fun things in life.

Why you may be 'Showering yourself to a standstill'.

Myofascia is a gel and when gels are heated they liquefy. You can heat up your fascia naturally with exercise or unnaturally with things like heat packs, hot showers or spa’s. Many treatment plans that have no knowledge of fascia and how it works recommend this, we believe that’s a big mistake! Because when you heat a gel it must eventually cool down and, the more you heat gels the harder they set when they cool. After a really hard workout you can be stiff the next day, stuck fascia is part of the reason.

Making friends with your Myofascia.

If you use hot water on fascia to get relief from pain or tension. It just gets more and more addictive. Over time you will need hotter and hotter showers or heat packs to get any relief and then hours later when your fascia sets, you will blame it on what you’re doing at the time. Lets be really clear if you are having a hot shower in the morning and feeling terrible later on.

You probably did it to yourself!

Think about making jelly then keep heating and setting it for a few weeks, months, years. If you’re already using hot showers and heat packs you already know you need more and more heat.

There is a way out of this cycle. Stop having hot showers.

If you turn up injured at our clinics we insist you agree to follow this advice, or we don’t even start treatment.

Common excuses for using heat.

If you think you need hot water to get clean after work, hot water actually opens the pores wider and lets dirt get further in so when the skin cools it’s trapped underneath. Warm is best for cleaning skin, and if you think you need it to warm up in the winter, you don’t, your body was never designed to be put in hot water, for showering, pleasant warm is ok. Just not hot!
Thousands of case histories tell us over time you will find this is, one of the best things you’ve ever done for your overall health. You will find you can work (or play) longer, be less tired and have limbs that move smoothly everyday, and be able to do lots more things and get way less tired. Try it for 3 weeks. The positive change in how your body moves will surprise you.

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Chris's visit

5/4/2011

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The 18th, 19th and 20th April were amazing days spent learning the craft that Chris has developed over the past 15 years with his bodytool. We saw 18 people in 1 1/2 hour blocks and some of the results of the soft tissue work were astonishing. We helped people with achilles problems, back issues, knee injuries, shoulder niggles and chronic pelvic pain disorders. Most have been back for a second visit already which is amazing considering some of the treatment is extremely painful. The lady who returned for her second pelvic treatment has had her life changed. Only People who have this condition will understand this!!! Chris is a fountain of knowledge about the body and how it reacts to pain over the years. People do not believe what he can do until they finally get in and get treated by him. Now I have a large part of that knowledge and am keenly looking forward to helping people remove their pain FOR EVER!
He also showed me many more tricks on how to train people on the Bodywall and some new stretches that will benefit people immediately. It's a hard product to describe how it works but once you try it people get it straight away. The second time they get it even more and train and stretch harder. Hence better results in strength, aerobic, anaerobic endurance and flexibility after each work out. Don't believe me? Come try for yourself.

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Chris Toal. Inventor of Bodywall in Sydney.

4/17/2011

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Chris is in Sydney for 3 days commencing Monday 18th. He will be providing further training to me on the many benefits of the Bodywall. He is also the inventor of 'bodytool' and 'scarsaway'. These stone massage tools are very effective in finding and helping to eliminate old scar tissue, adhesions and other soft tissue injuries. My clients and myself are looking forward to finally getting rid of these constant niggles. Most chronic pain conditions can be treated with these tools as well as the softening of burn scars. I am looking forward to a very busy and informative week.

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Stretching Session

4/6/2011

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Just spent the afternoon going through the exercise and stretch manual. Some of the exercises are nice and easy but some are insanely hard. But you truly can't beat the stretching the Bodywall achieves through the Upper Body and Torso. The intensity of the Lat Dorsi and side stretch is amazing but because you are in complete control of the stretch due to the gloves
and shoes it is completely safe. So after a hard workout I now feel a million bucks again thanks to the stretch session I had.

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A little bit about fascia. Might just explain why it is so important.

Hidden Pain. What is it and how does it relate to stress?

The most unique and innovative Personal Training and Rehabilitation equipment in UK. The Bodywall Training System

The 'Magic Stick'

1 Year on. Happy Birthday BodywallNorthShore.

What is the Bodytool, Pain Management and how does it work?

Heat. The Enemy of Recovery!

Chris's visit

Chris Toal. Inventor of Bodywall in Sydney.

Stretching Session

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