SPORTS MASSAGE

A DEGREE OF MASSAGE

Bob Bramah, MSMA

In this article the author gives a personal view on the current levels of massage training provided on the physiotherapy degree course.

I came to the study of physiotherapy from a background of being a sports and remedial massage practitioner. I had clients with a wide range of musculoskeletal dysfunction and I have attended many major sporting events to work as a massage practitioner, including the Commonwealth and Olympics games. To get to the Athens Olympics as a masseur, I needed to have completed 500 hours of training. This wasn’t just an arbitrary figure - it’s the number of hours necessary for registration as a masseur in most states of the USA. At these events and in placements in the NHS, I met many chartered physiotherapists who found it incredible that such a large number of hours could be devoted to massage. They had covered it in university and felt they knew enough about it for the limited amount of use it had in their work in the NHS.

Also in the current climate of evidence-based practice, massage lacked research support.

LACK OF RESEARCH SUPPORT Until I got to university I couldn’t understand this attitude. I’d seen for myself the effects that massage can have, not only in reducing dysfunction but more importantly in the huge effects on the well-being of my clients. There isn’t the space within this article to enter the evidence debate but there is a growing body of work supporting massage. I know this because it’s the subject of my dissertation and I as write I’m looking at a 30-strong pile of research papers published in the last year alone. Most of these support the psychological benefits and some show the physiological benefits. It’s true that the methodology never achieves the ‘gold standard’ of double blind randomised controlled trials but that applies to most manual therapy research.

As to training, during my 500 hours I covered massage theory, anatomy and physiology but a lot of time was for practical instruction and supervised practice. Most of the courses I’ve been on start with basic techniques and build-up to set routines for various body parts, each practiced repetitively under the watchful eye of an instructor, on hand to give feedback. This pro- vides a firm foundation for the therapist to develop their own repertoire.

THE MASSAGE COMPONENT As they like to say in academic circles, compare and contrast to my expe- rience at university. My comments apply specifically to my experience at Coventry University although I’ve spoken to students from other establish- ments whose courses may have a few more, or even a few less hours of study but are not that much different. At Coventry, anatomy and physiolo- gy is a separate subject. Massage is taught in the first year as part of a module called ‘Rehabilitation of Functional Movement’. The massage input started with a two hour lecture entitled ‘Massage and Soft Tissue Mobilisation’. Its main points were:

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