Were you recently flipping through your college catalog, trying to narrow down your choices so that you can begin working on your massage therapy training program? Are you more than a little overwhelmed and are looking to choose a specific direction with which to pursue? Are you at least somewhat drawn to a service oriented profession? If you answered a confident yes to each of these questions, then you will definitely want to consider pursuing a career as a massage therapist.
As a massage therapist it will be important that you can effectively communicate with your clients, this will make it possible for you to be informed about medical conditions or other important factors that you may need to know about prior to beginning the therapy session. It will also be critical that you have a personality that will allow your clients to be comfortable in your presence, since in most all cases your client will not be fully dressed. In your work as a massage therapist you will be working with a client’s soft tissue in order to treat any number of physical ailments or injuries that they are experiencing. You will use your touch in order to stimulate specific muscles or tissues, which are meant to help provide your client with some degree of relief.
Although you will likely spend the majority of your time performing massages on typical clients, you may also find that your services are required by athletes or people who are trying to recover from an injury or illness. All in all, the massage therapy that you will be performing will be used by your clients to help them feel relief from pain or discomfort, to help ease the strain that their muscles are feeling, or to just help eliminate the after effects that stress tends to leave on the body. While it is not a requirement, most massage therapists find that it is beneficial to choose an area of emphasis. This will allow you to focus your studies in one particular area, which will help you to become an expert of sorts in this particular area. For instance, you could choose to become an expert in deep tissue massages, Swedish massages, Shiatsu massages, sports massages, or trigger point massages.
It is important to understand that not all types of massage will benefit all types of clients. This is where your pre-massage consultation with your client will become very important. After all, it will not be ethical for you or beneficial to your client to perform a specific type of massage therapy session that you know will not help your client’s symptoms. Keep in mind, it is common for a massage therapist to choose to become specialized in more than one area of massage. This will allow you to be more versatile in what you can offer your clients, which is likely to keep busy and increase the amount of income that you can bring in.