My Bread and Barter

Bartering—the exchange of goods or services between two parties for mutual advantage—predates the use of currency and has probably been around since the dawn of humankind. It has even been argued that if symbiotic relationships are construed as a form of bartering, plants and animals engage in bartering as well.

According to “The History of Money,” a PBS online article from NOVA (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/moolah/history.html), “Cattle, which include anything from cows, to sheep, to camels are the first and oldest form of money”—though it’s hard to imagine the kind of purse you’d need to carry a cow or how you’d get change for a camel! But even when metal coins first appeared in China around 1000 bc and then elsewhere, such as Greece, Turkey (then known as Lydia), and Persia, around 500 bc, not everyone had access to coinage, and bartering continued to be a common way for people to get things they needed in exchange for things they had. We should all be glad, in any case, that tax misdeeds are punished, today, only with fines or jail time—unlike the Danes that lived in Ireland around ad 800–900 who, if they failed to pay the Danish poll tax, had their noses slit—hence the phrase “paying through the nose”!

The overlap of bartering and currency-based economies has never ceased entirely. However, despite former Nevada state GOP chair Sue Lowden’s recent suggestion that health care costs be lowered by having people barter with their doctors (which I’m sure would be ever-so-appealing to your HMO or PPO!), bartering has decidedly not been a primary means of obtaining goods and services for people in this country for quite some time. Our current economy, though, in which money can be as hard to come by as a pocketful of sheep, has caused a resurgence of bartering.

And given this climate, I have to say that having something like massage to trade has come in very handy. I am, I think I can safely say, the envy of all my friends in fields like academia, social work, and data processing. For the most part, I’ve traded massage for personal training sessions, but I have also traded for construction work on my home, design work for my business, and getting a handmade belt made for my kickass Monster Half-Marathon finisher’s belt buckle. Theoretically, I have editing and writing services to barter as well, but frankly, not only do people have much less need for those (or think they do!), but having your punctuation checked is far less alluring to most folks than getting your stress relieved.

There are limits, of course—it’s not like I can offer a massage to someone at AT&T in exchange for some phone service or at Jewel Foods for bread and milk. But small businesses of all manner, as well as individuals, seem open to the idea of doing trades. And for me it’s been a huge help with getting some of the things I need or want that I wouldn’t have been able otherwise to afford right now.

Making sure the trades are fair to both parties is potentially tricky, but so far, using my hourly massage rate as a gauge has made it relatively easy to ensure equity. It also bears considering whether something like massage can ethically be traded for certain kinds of services, especially when there is an ongoing relationship with those you hope to trade with. For instance, I think you’d have to question the professionalism of any psychotherapist who was willing to trade counseling for massage—boundary issues spring to mind. . . .

But in the main, having a spare massage in my wallet to use for “buying” certain goods and services has been great. It really is win-win. And right now I’ve got my eye on a birch sapling over at the local garden center. Not sure how many massages it would cost (or even if they’d be willing), but whatever the price, it would be worth it just to drive the sapling home in the box of my cargo bike!

The Wheels Roll Both Ways

The other day, my friend Brian Schab (schabpersonal@gmail.com) was coming to my house for the first time for a massage so I told him I’d pick him up at the el stop—in the bakfiets. I have been trading massages with Brian for boxing and personal training sessions, all of which had taken place at Fitness Formula Club where we both worked, until recently when Brian left there to strike out on his own. (I’ll have more to say on bartering in a future blog.)

Now, not many grown men—especially men who are martial arts experts—would be willing to sit in a wooden box on the front of a bike and let a woman pedal them down a major city street. But that’s what I like about Brian: he’s very open, not at all obsessed with showing how macho he is, and in possession of a good sense of humor. He climbed right in, sat down on the bench, and laughed about the fun of it all as I pushed the bike down off the kickstand and got ready to chauffeur him to my house.

Brian did refuse to put on the pink bicycle helmet I’d brought along for his safety. But to give full disclosure, I don’t believe it was the color that bothered him. Nor was it the possibility of messing up his hair, since he shaves his head. Rather, he was having trouble getting it to fit his head over his hat. So throwing caution—and my usually unwavering safety principles—to the wind (literally, as it turned out), we set off.

A little wobbly at first—Brian being my heaviest “cargo” to date—I gradually picked up speed as I gathered confidence. “This is awesome!” Brian shouted over the wind. “Hey,” said, “I not only pedal massage to you, I pedal you to massage.”

I only wish we'd gotten a picture. . . .

"Beyond That Which Is Known to Man"

Along with how amazing a massage feels, the thing that may surprise massage newbies the most is how science-based this practice is. Even after putting to rest any misconceptions about “happy endings,” far too many people seem to think that a massage is only a lot of rubbing and kneading. Though that may in fact be the case with a relaxation or stress-relieving sort of massage, every legitimate massage therapist who works in a state that requires massage practitioners to be licensed will have had to complete coursework that not only teaches them how to do basic massage techniques but also gives a fairly thorough understanding of the human body. At its most basic, this knowledge allows the therapist to make informed choices about what techniques might work best for which muscles or muscle conditions and to avoid endangerment sites: areas where nerves, arteries, or veins lie close to the surface, theoretically exposing them to possible damage during, say, deep tissue work. (The actual danger involved in massaging these so-called endangerment sites have recently been called into question, however; I plan to investigate further and post my findings here.)

Especially for therapists doing any kind of therapeutic work, though, such knowledge of the human body is particularly critical. There are probably innumerable examples of why this is so, but as an example, let me address the concept of referred pain. It is a fairly well established fact that, while you may perceive a pain to originate in a particular muscle, the source of the pain can actually be in another muscle entirely. Experience and/or advanced studies teach, for example, that a client pointing to pain in his or her neck might actually have tight muscles in the upper back that need to be treated as well. There are charts that can be consulted (and committed to memory) that show common referral patterns so that a therapist will know immediately that when heel pain is the issue, the soleus muscle should also be examined. But even if such charts have not been committed to memory, just the fact that a licensed therapist knows that where the pain seems to be isn’t necessarily where it comes from gives him or her the foresight to address more than a single muscle for any given complaint.

Some massage therapists rely especially heavily on the training they received and “go by the book” when working with a client. That is, continuing with the example of referred pain, they know where the sore spots in a muscle should be and where they should refer, and they simply go to those spots. And for the most part, this should work. It certainly makes sense for a therapist new to the field to take this approach.

But the longer I practice, the more I find that my own experience as a massage therapist along with a newly discovered sense of intuition have lead me beyond the guidance of my teachers and the textbooks. The word “intuition” doesn’t quite get at what I mean to convey, though, since intuition often originates, at least in healthcare fields, in a deep understanding of the human body. I have no doubt that intuition bears on the work I do, too, leading me to a knot in a muscle, say, without me even thinking about it.

There are times, though, when the process seems nearly mystical, as though I have been led to a muscle by some power or knowledge outside myself. Perhaps it is only intuition that guides me or only past experience. That would certainly seem reasonable. Or perhaps it is a sort of telepathy between myself and the client that evolves as I put my hands on him or her, maybe even subtle cues of some sort that I pick up from the client. But I can’t tell you how many times clients have commented on the fact that my hands go directly to a knot like metal to a magnet—ergo, the Knot Whisperer! It isn’t even only that, though.

It is also the way that when I am applying pressure to a knot with my elbow I feel a vibration as the knot begins to release. At first, I thought I must be imagining this vibration or confusing a shaking in my own body with what I took to be the client’s muscle loosening. There are a couple of pieces of evidence, however, that led me to conclude that I was neither imagining the pulsing nor confusing it with some tremor in my own body. To begin with, I noted that, before I applied pressure, the muscle had a distinct area of tightness—maybe a tight strand like a piano wire running through it or a flat piece of rock—whereas afterward, the muscle felt pliable, with no hard spot in the area where I had been working. In addition, when I would return to a muscle that I felt had released a little but not entirely, clients would often report that the pain was less than when I had pressed the first time, indicating that the muscle was indeed less tight. And finally, clients who are particularly in tune with their bodies will sometimes comment that they feel the muscle releasing simultaneous with the vibration I feel.

This might raise the question: What the heck are these vibrations? Am I feeling the actual movement of the muscle fibers as they let go of each other? Is it the energy created by the fibers being set in motion that I feel? Perhaps it’s some sort of transcendental force that I am sensing? In short, it is a very good question—for which I have no answer.

If this all sounds a little Twilight Zone to you, you’re not alone—it feels that way to me, too. Since it seems to be working, though, whatever it is, I have learned just to go with the flow. Of course, after my magical mystery tour of knots and adhesions and sore spots, I can talk science with the best of them, explaining, for instance, how Epsom salts help remove muscle-tightening chemicals produced by the body through osmosis or how a knot might have formed. But during the massage itself, there is not only science at work but also something deeper, more spiritual that connects me to clients in that moment. If this is true, that would explain why the client isn’t the only one who feels physically and mentally revived by the massage, why I, too, feel a sense of peace and improved health.

Love of Chair

I had been asked by my supervisor at Fitness Formula Club to do chair massage for an open house at one of the clubs we manage, in the building at 111 N. Wacker Dr. I had actually been the massage therapist at that club a little more than a year ago and left because it hadn’t been busy enough for me there. But I was happy to help out—especially since it would be a paid gig.

I am not, in general, a huge fan of chair massage as it can be taxing on me and it is hard to do a “proper” massage through clothing. Stiff fabrics, thick sweaters, belts, and so on can make having any kind of real engagement of muscles tricky at best. And though one rationale for doing chair massage is to introduce potential clients to your touch, it has seldom netted clients for me: most people simply want the free massage that is being offered by me or by their corporate entities.

But I was pleasantly surprised by my reception at 111. Several people were genuinely excited when it was decided that I would again work Thursdays at 111—this time on an on-call basis only—and one woman would have scheduled a 90-minute massage on the spot for later that day if I’d been available! This has given me a new Love of Chair.

For those of you who were not aficionados of the kids’ TV show The Electric Company in the early 1970s, “Love of Chair” is a reference to a recurring and silly episode on that show. Wikipedia succinctly sums it up thus: “Love of Chair: A spoof of the soap opera Love of Life. Announcer Ken Roberts (who, appropriately enough, was also the announcer for Life) read a Dick and Jane-style story about a boy (Skip Hinnant) sitting on a chair and doing other simple things. He concluded each sketch by asking questions in a dramatic tone such as “Will he stand up? Will he fall asleep? Will you fall asleep?” the last of which was always “And what about Naomi?” These questions were then followed by “For the answer to these and other questions . . . ,” at which point a cast member other than Hinnant would be shown briefly on-screen uttering a complete non sequitur (such as “What time is it?”).”

While my new appreciation for the value of chair massage is not exactly dramatic, what caused me to think of that old show was, in a twist of “Love of Chair,” “And what about the chair?” “Will the chair fit in the bakfiets? Will it fall out of the bakfiets? Would I fall over in the bakfiets?”—because the day before I was scheduled at 111, I had left the cargo bike at Fitness Formula Club, too tired to ride the nearly nine miles home that night. And then, too, I thought, leaving the cargo bike for the next day would afford a good test of whether the massage chair will work in the cargo bike as satisfactorily as the massage table does. In fact, the chair fits even more easily and snugly into the box of the cargo bike than does the table.

It just seems like every few days I find that the cargo bike is even more useful in even more circumstances than I’d ever considered. Now I can haul anything from groceries or a six-year-old nephew to a massage table or chair through nearly any weather, what with the new studded tires. It is slow going, riding to work downtown on the bakfiets, and it may never be practical to ride such long distances to deliver massage—at least not unless I can grab a shower and a change of clothes first! But it is good to know that I have this sturdy, reliable transportation option available. And now clients only three or four miles away will seem like a snap to bike to!

How I Came to Pedal Massage

I'm delighted to have more viewers coming to this blog and I offer this post as an introduction to how I came to combine two of my great loves, massage and biking.

Long ago and eighty miles away, I began my love affair with bikes by trying to destroy one. Getting a massage—much less giving one—wasn’t even a gleam in my eye when, at ten, I inherited my mother’s beat-up old Schwinn with coaster brakes and balloon tires (like the one shown here). Despite my grandfather’s having lovingly repainted it for me, I found the bike hideous given that everyone else was riding little bikes with banana seats or multispeed bikes with skinny tires. I reasoned that, were I to break the bike, I’d get a new one. Or at the very least, I would show myself to be disdainful of the bike in front of my peers. So I systematically set about a plan to ruin it, riding it under the chin-up bar on the playground, grabbing hold of the bar, and letting the bike go sailing into the chain-link fence or riding it down small flights of stairs. Sometimes I’d even jump off and let it crash dead-on into the brick school wall. But nothing would destroy that bike.

Finally, in junior high, I begged my mother for a new bike. She thought I’d soon outgrow it, heading into high school as I was. I pleaded with her, promised I’d continue to ride it. Eventually, I got an inexpensive three-speed, the primary redeeming quality of which was that it didn’t have balloon tires. I don’t remember now whether I kept my promise. I certainly didn’t ride it to school, that much I recall. So maybe my mother was right.

But then two things happened to renew my love of bike riding. First, my uncle became an avid cyclist. Whatever my uncle’s interests were, the rest of us would soon get sucked in. We all became archers for awhile, for instance, including my mom and my grandparents. It was a lot easier to find a place to ride a bike in the city than to shoot arrows, so that was definitely a point in favor of bicycling. I learned phrases foreign to most of the general populace, like “truing a wheel” and “trimming my gears.”

The second thing that happened is that I had moved out of my parents’ home and into an apartment. Getting to my part-time job from my apartment via public transportation was neither convenient nor affordable with the pittance I made at the Milwaukee Journal, where I took calls from customers wanting to start or stop a subscription or complain about their carrier. My first girlfriend and I went bike shopping and settled on ten-speed Falcon racing bikes, the Eddie Merckx model. Merckx was a name I recognized, thanks to my uncle, as bike-racing royalty of sorts, and that was enough to sell me.

Racing bikes, in those days, were not built with women in mind. But despite the long reach to the down-turned handlebars and the gearshift lever—and despite the fact that few people were using bikes for much more than recreation in those days—my girlfriend and I rode to work and school. Once, I remember, we even had to make our way home on our bikes a trifle tipsy after a rare dinner out that featured margaritas.

My bike was my primary mode of transportation through much of college, but when I got a job in Franksville, WI, and then relocated to San Jose, CA, my bike got put away more or less permanently for the next fifteen or twenty years. There were little intermittent spurts of renewed interest, but the circumstances weren’t right, during those years, to encourage more regular biking on my part.

Fast forward to 2006. Feeling there were no more challenges in my position as a copyeditor at the University of Chicago Press, I boldly—or insanely, depending on your point of view!—left my full-time job to go to massage therapy school. Ensuing economic constraints and the eight-mile ride from home to school got me back on the bike. When I got a job as a massage therapist at Fitness Formula Club downtown, not far from where I went to school, I was able to continue riding. Exercise, money saving, and environmentally friendly: biking was the whole package.

But when it came to seeing clients in their homes on my own, unable to figure out a way to bungee my table to my bike rack, I was forced to use my car or public transportation. Using the car was an easy way to transport the table, but I hated contributing to traffic congestion and carbon emissions, whereas getting a table on and off buses, even folded in half and in a case, was no easy task.

Then I discovered the Dutch bike WorkCycle bakfiets (pronounced bahk-feets and translated as “box bike”). WorkCycles, located in Amsterdam, was founded by Brooklyn-born Henry Cutler. The bakfiets is perfect for carrying kids, groceries—or a massage table—because the low box and perfect geometry make it steady and easy to handle. And when the bike is not in use, it sits very firmly on a parking stand, allowing for easy loading and unloading. (WorkCycles, one of several companies that manufactures bakfiets-style bikes, can be purchased locally at Dutch Bike Co. Chicago,
 651 W. Armitage Ave. [http://www.dutchbikeseattle.com/]).

The bakfiets allows me to bike to clients within the boundaries of Cumberland on the west, Clark on the east, Howard on the north, and Washington on the South and provide them in-home massages—with no guilt about adding to their carbon footprint. I like to think this means they can clear out the knots from their muscles while also clearing up their karma.

How I'd Get That Pain? Part 2, Torso

As noted in part 1 of this article, there are times when there is little doubt about why you have a particular pain. But if you have a muscle pain that seems to come from nowhere, factors such as those listed below might be responsible—factors that could be avoided in the future. Of course, when you can’t dodge an ache, it’s time to see your massage therapist!

Muscle	Location	Stressors of That Muscle
Rectus abdominis	Top layer of muscle over the center of the belly	Prolonged driving in the car; collapsed chest and rounded shoulders; excessive exercise; pregnancy or obesity
External obliques	Sides of ribs and belly	Actions involving throwing; scoliosis and postures with compressed ribs; prolonged postures involving a rotational component (e.g., sitting at a desk in a sustained twisted position); pregnancy or obesity
Internal obliques	Outer edges of the front of the belly	Compressed posture toward one side; leaning toward one side or forward for long periods of time while seated; pregnancy or obesity
Iliopsoas	Front of hip bone to spine, through the abdomen	Prolonged sitting with knees above the hip or hip in a jackknifed position; hyperlordosis/anterior pelvic tilt; sleeping in a fetal position; lower limb length inequality or small hemipelvis; excessive sit-ups
Pectoralis major	Chest, from breastbone to upper arm	Collapsed chest, protracted head syndrome, protracted/rounded shoulders; excessive exercise (e.g., push-ups, weight machines); sustained lifting in a fixed position (e.g., using power tools)
Pectoralis minor	From third and fourth ribs to top of arm; under pec major	Use of a crutch; prolonged compression (e.g., carrying a knapsack with a tight strap); kyphosis, poor sitting habits or poor chair design, poor posture; collapsed chest, respiratory problems, vigorous breathing; prolonged position with arm overhead (e.g., during sleep or painting a ceiling)
Serratus anterior	Side of first eight or nine ribs	Excessive exercise such as push-ups, lifting heavy weights overhead; irritation of lungs (e.g., smoking, asthma, chronic cough); excessively fast or prolonged running
Deltoid	Top of arm, at shoulder	Intramuscular injections, such as B vitamins, penicillin, influenza vaccine; overhead repetitive strain develops during prolonged lifting (e.g., holding a power tool); any repetitive movement with arms at or above shoulder height
Rhomboids	Between spine and shoulder blades, deep to middle traps	Well-developed pectoralis major muscle pulls the shoulder forward, overloading the weaker rhomboid muscle; prolonged leaning forward and working in the rounded shoulder position
Trapezius, middle	Top of thoracic spine to top of shoulder	Collapsed chest and protracted shoulders; kyphotic and scoliotic conditions; behaviors associated with forward head posture
Trapezius, lower	Mid-thoracic spine to top of shoulder	Rounded shoulders; if there is kyphosis, the lower traps becomes a postural muscle, acting like a fourth erector spinae
Subscapularis	Under the shoulder blade	Repetitive/chronic tendonitis; reaching in back seat of car and lifting a heavy object; playing tennis, weightlifting
Infraspinatus	Covers the lower part of the shoulder blade	Sleeping on the affected side (compresses and stimulates trigger points); sleeping on opposite side (arm falls forward, stretching affect muscle bands); grabbing backward for support to regain balance or mis-hitting a ball in racket sports
Supraspinatus	Covers the upper part of the shoulder blade	Carrying heavy objects (such as a suitcase) with arm hanging down at the side; lifting objects above shoulder height with the arm outstretched
Teres major	Stretches from lower part of outer edge of shoulder blade to top of arm	Driving a heavy car without power steering; butterfly stroke during swimming
Quadratus lumborum	From mid-lumber spine to last rib	Sitting on a wallet; functional short leg; contracts with high hip or anterior pelvic title; awkward lifting movements; carrying a child on a hip over a long period of time
Latissimus dorsi	Lower part of the thoracic spine to top of arm	Repetitive reaching forward and upward, either to manipulate some awkwardly large object or to pull something down (e.g., butterfly stroke); rounded shoulder posture

Four Seasons, Two Wheels, One Great Massage

When I first bought the bakfiets, a.k.a. the cargo bike, I thought I would get five, maybe six months of the year out of it for massage transportation. But this week—after riding through a minor snowstorm to get to the Dutch Bike store (http://www.dutchbikeco.com/), some seven miles from my home—I had studded tires put on the bakfiets. And now, I’m a two-wheeling massage therapist for all seasons.

No one is more surprised about this than I am. When I left my tomboy childhood, I also left behind any semblance of daring. The thought of riding a bike on snowy, icy streets has always horrified me. What if I slipped on the ice and fell into traffic? This is not the kind of attitude that has gotten Mount Everest climbed or Antartica discovered, that has sent snowboarders hurtling over cliffs or motorcycles sailing across ravines. Of course, I’m not trying to conquer great forces of nature—just Elston Avenue. And now, when I need an intact body to earn my living, risking life and limb for fresh air and a greener form of transportation seemed downright foolhardy.

But then some sort of weird confluence occurred where it seemed like everyone I knew was talking about studded tires for bikes. Okay, so it was Alex at Roscoe Village Bikes (http://www.roscoevillagebikes.com/) and Vince at Dutch Bike. But they were very convincing. And Vince said the bakfiets was great in snow. Because of its weight, it could just plow right through. And then I was thinking about how much I enjoy riding the bakfiets and how much I was missing riding my bike, and the next thing I knew, I was trundling through snow clogged streets to get studded tires. Several guys on road bikes zipped by me, as though the snow was hardly an inconvenience for their skinny tires, but I hardly gave them a thought, amazed as I was that I—scaredy cat me—was riding a bike through the slushy, slippery streets. New flakes pelted my face and eyes, making the trip even slower going, but speed was not the point of this excursion anyway.

Today, I go pick up the bakfiets, with its new studded tires. With these tires and with my new goggles—those flakes felt like little darts zinging my eyes—I am hoping I will become even more intrepid. There may be days yet when the weather interferes with my bringing massage to clients by bike. But there will be far fewer of those than I ever imagined.