Do you offer self-care to your clients? I’ve always been a big proponent of a little homework, and over the years I’ve come up with stretches that seem to help with pain, and that clients will actually follow through with:
And that’s what I’d like to talk about today—how to get clients to actually do self-care. In the world of medicine and physical therapy, this is called “compliance” or “treatment adherence,” and it can often make all the difference to patient outcomes. And still, it’s really hard to get patients to do exercises, take their pills, etc!
What hope do we have if people won’t even take a whole course of antibiotics? As massage therapists, we have a unique opportunity to bring our clients on board. I don’t just give a stretch printed on a piece of paper and see my client out the door. Instead, I relate it back to the massage I just gave: “Remember the tight muscles in your chest and shoulders? Those muscles are important for upper back pain.” We’ve just given the client a great deal of information about their body through massage, and that’s a much better motivator than “because I said so.”