Balance Point Therapy is designed to assist and greatly advance Massage Therapists in education and technique. The story of how it was shown to Brandon Ellis, LMT is below. It’s long, but good:
How Balance Point Therapy came into existence…
As a massage therapist in the Portland, Oregon area I was struggling to keep my massage practice from crumbling into the ground. Clients came in with physical issues and complaints that I thought basic massage could help, but I just wasn’t getting the results I (and my clients) wanted with that style. I was strictly a Swedish massage therapist with a plethora of stretches, but without any real or concrete results. People felt pampered, relaxed, and great when they left because of the relaxing massage, but they still had the chronic or acute problem they had when they first came in.
I became disheartened and felt the career path I chose wasn’t a correct one. I was marketing and marketing myself, getting people in from here and there, but without the return clients I expected. I then heard of a Massage Therapist named Rawle Morris across the river from me. He had over 50 clients a week, charging the price he thought was worthy of his talents – $75 an hour – and was getting miraculous results. Results that I never knew massage could ever attain.
I called him up and told him my situation. I even asked if he would like to trade as I would love to learn his techniques. He said he couldn’t. He said that he doesn’t teach massage and he doesn’t do trades. He was far too busy. “You can give me a call ever so often if you need some tips,” he said, which I did. However, his tips didn’t mean a whole lot to me as I didn’t know what he was talking about. He would say, “Release the psoas, piriformis, and QL and you will get your desired results.” That sounded simple enough, but how do you “release” the muscle? I have heard of it and I have massaged a muscle so much that I thought it should have released, but I didn’t get the results he was getting.
I gave up on calling him and took several continuing education classes that I thought would give me the answers I was looking for. They helped out a lot, but I wasn’t getting the results that Rawle was getting and I wasn’t getting the referrals that he was receiving as well. In fact, he said he had never even marketed himself once in his life. He was all referral.
I then smartened up and simply went to see him. I saw him twice a week for three months.
I had my own health issues, so at my first session, I could hardly move my knee without pain and on a few occasions my knee had locked up. For this issue, he didn’t focus on my knee. In fact, he never touched my knee. I stood next to his massage table as he examined my pelvis. He put his thumbs just above my sacrum and said, “Okay, bend forward and…stop.” He then mumbled something under his breath and added, “Bend forward and…stop.” He took his thumbs off of my pelvis and scratched his chin, saying, “Yep, that’s what I thought. It’s your SI Joint, but we’ll get to your psoas first.”
I hopped up on the table and lay on my back. He performed his psoas release and as he did so I could feel a small amount of pain radiating from my psoas down to my knee. He spent about five minutes releasing that muscle.
“Do you still feel any pain radiating to your knee?” he asked.
I shook my head, “No, not anymore.”
Then he said, “Alright, turn over.”
I turned over and he worked on my right SI joint. He spent a couple of minutes on it, then said stand up and walk around the room.
As I did so, he asked, “How does your knee feel?”
I stood in awe as I asked, “How did you do that?” The pain was almost gone. My knee felt light and free.
He replied, “I’ll teach you. Just watch what I do and ask me as many questions as you’d like.”
During the next session, he took away the headaches that I had had for months. In only four or five sessions, he took years of low back pain away. Rawle balanced me out to the point where I didn’t remember ever feeling so good.
In each session, he’d walk over to the muscular/skeletal chart that hung on the wall to show me which muscles he worked on and the techniques he had just used and would explain how it affected my body.
It took me awhile to be able to use these techniques on my clients, but once I did I was seeing results that I had never seen before. I was as inexperienced and as nervous as ever, but I was seeing client after client getting better and their responses were, “Whatever you’re doing—keep doing it.”
Implementing the Technique
The technique was taught to me by Rawle Morris, LMT. He taught me methods, such as Trigger Point Therapy, that was discovered by Janette Travell, M.D., and PNF, which is a Physical Therapy technique created in the 40′s and 50′s. He used it in a specific way, always focusing on balancing the body out first, then going after the rest of the body later. It is all very simple to use and easy to implement into your style, which is the corner stone of the technique.
You will learn
The Style of Balance Point Therapy
The best way to describe the style that I teach is that it’s a mix of Trigger Point therapy and a technique I call PNF Pin-Stretch. It is used in an optimal way to help a client get better, completely balanced, and pain free, even if they have been in pain for ten to twenty years. It is very simple to learn and you could simply incorporate the techniques into the style you currently use. Better yet, you would have the confidence to work on anybody that comes to you with just about any issue, chronic or acute.
The Continuing Education Classes
The classes focus on balancing the Core and the Upper Core first. Long lasting results cannot be attained without balance. It’s a simple truth in life. Once the Core and Upper Core are learned, we then focus on the many different conditions and issues that massage therapists see on a daily basis, such as, stiff, stuck, and/or kinked neck, sore, swollen, or injured muscles in the knee, chronic sciatica, restless leg syndrome, scoliosis, rib issues, lordosis, thoracic outlet syndrome, upper back and chest pain, and many other pains, aches, and twinges in the body.
Along with balancing out the core, chest, and upper back I would focus on one other important group of muscles in the body – the scalenes. The scalenes cause 80% of all upper back, chest, arm, and hand issues. When you work on the scalenes in a certain way – the way that I will teach you (which is so simple it is ridiculous) – you can greatly relieve carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, rotator cuff issues, upper back pain, false angina, etc.
When clients get results with these issues and from your hands, your massage career will evolve into a thriving massage practice.
So, check out the site, the seminars, the ecourses, and enjoy a new perspective or a new way of helping clients out by using Balance Point Therapy.
Thank you very much,
Brandon Ellis, LMT #12645, NCBTMB #451067-09
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