ON-SITE MASSAGE

DEFINITION OF ON-SITE MASSAGE

On-Site Massage is performed through the clothes on a specially designed chair. It lasts for 15-20 minutes and is aimed at the corporate environment. Its aims are to first of all relax the client, de-stressing and relieving general muscular tension, and then to rejuvenate and re-vitalise, ready to go back to work.
On-Site Massage is an innovative way for a company to improve the productivity of their employees. Many companies have also found a decline in absenteeism.
The Touch Research Institute in Florida has a published study on the benefits of On-Site Massage. The results are as follows:-

1. Decreased EEG Alpha and Beta Waves and increased delta activity, consistent with enhanced alertness.
2. Mathematical problems were completed in significantly less time with significantly fewer errors after massage.
3. Anxiety and job stress levels were lower at the end of the one-month period.*

A Brief History of On-Site Massage

 It is sometimes called Chair or Seated Massage, terms which differentiate it from the more traditional forms of Table Massage.
Although massage work on seated patients has always been a part of most systems of massage, Chair massage as a self contained system is a relatively recent phenomenon.
In 1982 David Palmer took over as the Director of the Amma Institute of Traditional Japanese Massage and he realised that there was not enough work to go around for the graduates of the Institute. Traditional Table Massage is too intimate and too expensive for many people to want to try it. He therefore developed a form of massage that could be done anywhere, in a shorter time and with clothes on. Thus Chair Massage was born.
In 1984 he and his graduates started working at Apple Computers giving up to 350 on site massages a week.  In 1986 production began of the chair that had been specially designed for this type of work, just twelve years later more than 100,000 of these chairs were in use around the world.
Chair Massage is not positioned as a therapy or treatment but as a simple relaxation technique. This makes it more accessible to people not looking for personal growth and life changing treatment. It also makes it a way into deeper massage for people who might not otherwise take the first step.
Chair massage is now available in shopping malls and airports as well as in many corporate workplaces all over America and increasingly in Britain. It is an accessible and popular form of bodywork bringing the advantages of massage to people who might not otherwise experience it.
David Palmer says that his ultimate vision is to have all children in primary school learn basic shoulder rubs for their family and friends. "When we reach that point I will know that we have arrived at our goal of a world where touch is recognised as essential to the development and maintenance of healthy human beings."

Chair Massage is fast becoming the most popular form of skilled touch on the contemporary bodywork landscape. In airports, shopping malls, convention centres, corporate board rooms, supermarkets, street corners, dentist's surgeries, and hospitals you can now find practitioners bringing professional massage for the first time to the masses.

Ancient Roots and 20th Century Pioneers

Massaging clients who are seated is hardly an exclusively contemporary phenomenon.
Centuries-old Japanese block prints illustrate people, having just emerged from a nearby bath, receiving massage while seated on a low stool. Indeed, many styles of Japanese table or floor massage traditionally perform a portion of each session (often at the beginning or end) with the client sitting up, rather than lying down. We can safely presume that, for as long as people have been rubbing each other's aches and pains away, some of the massaging has been done while the receiver was in an upright position.**

Sources:

*Fields, T, Ironson, G, Scafidi, F, Nawrocki, T, Goncalves, A, Burman, I, Pickens, J, Fox, N, Schanberg, S and Kuhn, C (1996) International Journal of Neuroscience,

**Positive Health 1998/TouchPro Institute. (www.touchpro.com)