We all heard it, and we all thought about it, but what good will that clear stuff really do for us after a massage? “Drink lots of water after each session, it will help flush out all those toxins.” The famous words given to just about everyone who receives a massage! Drinking water is an important factor after a massage session, and will help you get the most out of your massage.

Massage is soft tissue manipulation that provides an increase of blood flow to our body. Those “feel good spots”, and an “ahh” moment happens when we increase the blood flow to a specific area that has been blocked. The blocked area is usually from muscle tightness, which comes from stress, physical activity, emotion distress or injury. We need a large amount of water after muscle manipulation occurs because these ‘spots’ are potent and toxic to our body and need the assistance of water to be flushed out.

A Toxic World

Toxins enter our muscles through many different ways.

• Physical and emotional stress
• Drinking and smoking
• A poor diet
• Your job
• Coffee
• Pills and Medications
• Sex ( lol…just kidding)

When we put medication in our body to help ease the pain or for any kind of headache or migraine symptom relief, pills leave excess toxins behind.  These toxins than are settled into our muscles causing muscle tightness and spasms. It is also not uncommon to have muscles tighten or go into spasm due to extreme muscle dehydration caused from lack of sufficient water intake.

Physical activity, stress and injuries create the muscle tissues to build-up toxins in specific areas of the body. Lactic acids, stress hormones, and dehydration are all causes of knots. Water is seen as the “liquid drano” for our bodies to flush out lactic acid and metabolic wastes that cause these knots. When a particular working muscle is dehydrated, it searches for a water source and most often clings to other muscle tissue for this water source.

How Does Massage Therapy Help?

When toxins build up in your body you will feel sluggish and pain. Muscle tissues become very dehydrate and nutrient deprived which will cause more pain and a lack of energy. Massage Therapists have to break apart these tissues which can be painful but for most individuals this is a “feels good moment” because we create more blood flow to the specific dehydrated muscles. When these are broken down and the tissue is back in its normal state, we need water to help keep the muscle tissue hydrated and healthy.

Water is an undervalued tool for the body and it has so many benefits. It helps with headaches, hunger, general hydration, organ health, and weight loss. By the way, it’s always a good idea to empty your bladder before you get started with your massage. If you metabolize quickly, you may start detoxing on the table (well your bladder will get full), and you may want to go use the restroom right after if not during the massage. Next time when you go to your massage, drink a little before your session, and a little more after. Just drink up and be merry!

How much water do I need on a daily basis?

“A simple rule is to take your weight in pounds, divide in half, and drink that number of ounces of water. So for a person how weighs 150lbs, you should be drinking 75 ounces of water. Do not over-drink, thinking that you can overcome months or years of under-drinking by drinking a lot in a few days. Drink your amount (as calculated above) daily & your body will fully re-hydrate over a long period of time.” (Dr. F. Batmanghelidj, M.D).

This article was contributed by Andrea Naugle

to learn more about this sports massage therapist click here

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Massage marketing lessons learned 101

My partner and I have over 20 years of combined massage marketing experience with our massage business, RPM Therapy, and she would be the first to tell you that we have made allot of mistakes during that time. But I am not here to bother you with our failures, as we are sure that you have your own long list of failures.

Your massage business will directly be affected, by how successful your marketing campaigns are. In addition to that, how well you treat your clients. Remember no marketing campaign in the world, will save your massage business from bad or poor quality service or a lack of professionalism within your business.

So with said, this list, that I am providing here for you, is my experiences being a massage therapist, I have over 11 years of trial and error, successes and failures, that you can take from and learn. It is my hope that this will save you much time, energy and money on the things, that will not work in your massage practice. Most of the items that I listed here will be easy to complete, some of it will require a little work and research on your part.

Do the things below and I guarantee you that you will be successful in your massage business whether you work for yourself or for a spa, it does not matter. Marketing yourself is constant.

My top 10 ways to market your massage business is…

1. Always provide 5 star quality massage service. Even if means to lose money. If you have an client that was unhappy with their massage session for whatever reason, the pressure was not deep enough, you forgot to turn off your cell phone and it went off during the session, whatever the reason if they were not happy with your massage service, do not charge them for that session. Give it to them for free or discount the session.

Providing a 5 star service, also means going out beyond the call of duty, give your clients the energy they deserve, do not just go through the motions during your massage, if you cannot do this for your clients you should not be working on them. All personal matters go away before you lay your hands on that client. Give them an extra 10 minutes, but be sure to “ask them” for their permission before doing so, just in case they have an appointment to keep right after. But chances are you will just be hinting to them about the “extra” attention they are receiving from you, at “no charge”.

2. Your massage clients are paying you for an “experience” not your service. The massage customer has many massage therapists to choose from, what makes them come back is how you made your client felt, emotionally from your work. Not because you have a special offer or some discounted service that you have or how many years you have been a massage therapist. Provide an “experience” for your clients and watch your business grow.

3. Get testimonials. What others say about your massage business or service is more powerful than what you can say about your massage business. So get testimonials, plenty of them, what I recommend here is for you to put testimonials on all your marketing pieces and your website. Opening up a yelp.com acct. and getting your top massage clients to say something about your services is highly recommended. Last month alone we had 30 new clients from yelp.

4. Come up with 20 to 30 keywords and keyword phrases for your massage business. This where you will do a little research, I listed www.goodkeywords.com and www.tools.seobook.com and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal as good resources to start with. You want to look for keywords and keyword phrases that relate to your massage business and target clients that you want to work with. These powerful tools will also give you search volume as well as how competitive these words are. Once you have your keywords, these keywords will form the basis for all your marketing literature, articles writing and your market segment that you choose to target your massage services to, start a blog.

5. Start a blog, blogging allows for you to talk about your massage business to your current massage clients and to share with potential clients what you have to offer. And it will position you as an “expert” in your area of expertise whether you specialize in. Whether it be a Reiki massage, a sports massage, a deep tissue massage or reflexology. Use your keywords from step 4 to guide you on your blog writing. Blogger is the easiest way to get up and running with a blog but I recommend that you go with www.wordpress.org. It’s free and wordpress.org has many free upgrades and modifications that search engines like Google and Yahoo love.

*This will require you do some research as well but well worth the trouble if you are not technically savvy with html and coding, hire someone and let them do it for you. You can outsource the blog writing if you are not a writer but I would suggest for you to get out of your comfort zone and start writing about your massage work and experiences as being a bodyworker.

6. Open up a Merchantcircle.com account, I would do this whether you have a website or not. The reason being, first of all it is free, it can serve as a website (if you don’t have one) and it has a blogging platform as well, that is so easy to use. But most important it has great web traffic presence (high alexa rating), Google and Yahoo visits Merchantcircle.com often. Plus it targets local demographics, which you want, many times when I post a blog with my main keywords in the title and in the body content, I usually see my posting on the first or second page within a few days, this is powerful.

7. Bookmark your content and articles, wordpress.org blogs have many free plugins that you can add to your blog that will allow you to bookmark your content. Get your clients, friends and family members to bookmark your content and articles as well. Bookmarking your articles is something that you will have to learn but such websites like, www.squidoo.com, www.dig.com, www.mixx.com and www.stumbleupon.com are just some of the ones you can take a look at. MerchantCircle recently added bookmarking to their blogging platform; this is a very powerful way for getting a web presence and traffic.

8. Write articles and submit them to article directories. Article marketing is a very powerful free way to market your massage business. Use the keywords from step 4, you can write the articles yourself and submit them to directories like ezinearticles.com, searchwarp.com and goarticles.com. Article writing has many great benefits, it is great for positioning yourself as someone who knows their stuff and it can generate backlinks to your blog or website that will send a significant amount of web traffic to you. Traffic that has an interest in what you are writing about. But the content must be good and original, if you are not a writer outsource your article writing. Your article also can be used for your blog post and vice versa.

*Searchwarp.com is an excellent platform for your articles, you get a blog in your name that will host all your articles and it has bookmarking options for each article, this is also very powerful. If you find it in your heart to bookmark my articles, I would really appreciate it very much, thank you.

9. Get a professional website. Do not use a free template. Pay the extra money to get a professional design, this can also be applied to your blog, again there are many free blog templates but a professional designed one will serve you better. If you cannot afford to get a professionally designed one wait until you can then upgrade. Make sure that your website is done by a professional. You want someone who is knowledgeable about keywords, title tags, layout and design and search engine requirements. Outsourcing your website and blogging designs is so much easier with websites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com and it is fairly easy to find affordable options.

Also be sure to include an optin box on your website for list building. Giveaway a free report on the benefits of massage, have a monthly newsletter or offer an additional 15 minutes to be added to their next massage when they optin (give you their email address). This will help you to build a list of customers and people interested in receiving emails and updates from you. In your emails you can provide useful massage information, upcoming massage events that you are participating in and special promotional massage offers.

10. Purchase an email marketing service. We use constantcontact.com but they are many to choose from. If you decide to try constant contact be sure to let them know that I referred you, we will both get a $30 dollar credit towards your bill as well as mine. Statistics say that it usually takes someone 7 times to see your message before they will respond, having an email marketing system in place is powerful and makes for emailing your list very easy and highly responsive. Before you send your emails to your list, you must have permission to email them. Do not include email addresses to your list just because someone gave you their business card. Get permission from that individual before you add them to your email list. if you don’t have permission to email that person, it is spam and spam is not tolerated or legal.

*Bonus tip: Have an online scheduling system on your website or blog. This has been a big key for us, for having a successful marketing campaign. Not only will it schedule your clients for you 24/7. But it will also collect their physical address, email address (oh btw, if you have an online massage scheduler for your business then you do not need a optin box for your website, this system collects it for you), phone number and date of birth. We love this feature as we use it to email or send a card, to our clients celebrating a birthday, including a special offer for them on their next massage session with us.

What I love about the online scheduling system are the reports that you can generate from it. You cannot improve what you can’t measure or track. Tracking information is crucial to knowing if your marketing efforts are effective and also for tracking massage appointments. We are able to generate reports on how our clients heard about us, how many clients have come in for a given month, how often our clients come back to us etc, etc.

Well there it is, again, I sure hope that this information has been useful, if you have some of your own successful marketing strategies that I have not included here, please share them with us. And if you are local to San Jose, Ca. visit our massage website Rpm Therapy.

Our San Jose Massage Business just added a new sports massage minded therapist to our team. RPM Therapy is very happy to have her.

I am a very active individual and have seen how sports massage can help you become a better athlete, emotionally and physically. I am a college swimmer, Run Marathons, and just completed my first Triathlon in May. Sports massage is highly beneficial after a workout and I have seen personally how fast you can recover after a massage. Other activities I enjoy are backpacking, surfing, snowboarding, and mountain biking.

“No session is ever the same. My work is always changing. I use specific techniques for each muscle group, including deep tissue work, and stretching.”

I began my education in massage because I am a believer of holistic health. I believe the body can heal from within, and massage is a great way to help facilitate the healing process. I believe massage is a way to help rehabilitate the body back into homeostasis. In Western society we believe that rehabilitation consists of ‘Pill popping’ and surgeries. The healing process takes time, and pills are sometimes necessary, we often use this as a quick fix to get back to life as soon as possible. Even though massage is a wonderful, it’s undervalued. This is seen as a tool for enhancing wellness, I have always recognized it to be but one part of the total wellness equation.

I specialize in treatments that use MyoFascial Release. Myofascial Release is a very effective technique that provides sustained pressure on a specific muscle to eliminate pain and restore motion. Fascia is tissue that runs through the body then connects to our entire structure. When is at its normal state it’s able to move and stretch. When we experience physical trauma or injury this begin to tighten which causes a lot of pain and discomfort.

Andrea Naugle has been a Certified Massage Therapist Since June 2007. She completed a 750 Hour program and obtained a letter of excellence upon graduation. She has been a member of the American Massage Therapeutic Association since 2006.

Andrea completed her Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Studies, Minored in Psychology at Cal State Easy Bay in 2004. She was a sports teacher in San Francisco before she began her career in Massage Therapy.

You can book your massage session with Andrea online by visiting our online massage scheduler here. Andrea’s has devoted Sunday’s and Wednesday’s. As these days book up she will continue to add more days to her massage schedule, thank you.

Andrea’s Massage hours

Sunday 10am - 6pm

Wednesday 10am - 8pm

www.rpm-therapy.com

Our San Jose Massage Business, Roman Paradigm Massage has just opened a Facebook page. Can someone please tell Mark Zuckerberg that he needs to come in for a massage.

The popularity of social media websites like Facebook has a viral effect that just seems to grow wings, and take off like a jet airplane. Personally, I can’t make sense of it, but I do understand the power of it. So as part of our ongoing marketing efforts at Roman Paradigm Massage aka “RPM Therapy” we wanted to jump aboard and entice you to help us market our massage business to all your friends.

So, for the first 5 people to become a fan on our Facebook page and writes on our wall, we are going to offer you a savings of $25 off your next massage, whether you are new to our massage business or have seen us before. You can take advantage of this special offer. We have a new female massage therapist named Andrea starting this Sunday. She specializes in Sports massage and Myofascial Release.

Doreen Jattan and I, try very hard to keep you as our loyal clients, but don’t just take my word for it, go to www.yelp.com here at http://www.yelp.com/biz/rpm-therapy-san-jose to read our 5 star reviews.

Here are just some of the things we do at RPM Therapy to make sure that not only is your money spent well here, but that your whole massage experience with us is worth every dollar.

1. We offer online scheduling- this alone has been a big favorite with our clients. You no longer have to play phone tag to get a massage appointment. And, by registering online and booking your massage appointment online, you do not have to fill out any paperwork when you come in.

2. We offer a 100% money back guarantee- if for any reason you are not satisfied with your massage session you pay nothing. This also applies to any massage gift certificates that you purchase from us. You are also given the choice to see another therapist if you prefer.

3. Buy massage gift certificates online- do you need a quick gift for someone, a friend, co–worker or family member? If you do, you can now go to our website and purchase a massage gift certificate and pay with your paypal account. We will send it to whomever you want, or you can send that person in for a “prepaid massage” paid by you. Also you have the option to prepay for your massage session before you come in.

4. Professional, certified, and insured massage therapists- all of our massage therapists are seasoned bodyworkers. We have massage therapists who specialize in certain backgrounds, massage techniques and knowledge. We will soon have a bio page for every massage therapist that works with us in order to help you better understand which therapist will be right for you. Until then you can visit our massage techniques page to read more.

We at RPM Therapy are trying to continually improve our massage business, if that’s even possible…lol. Our goal of course is helping you to understand the importance of taking care of your health and well-being. And by all means, we are not saying that massage will cure all of your ills. But a preventive maintenance stress-relieving program in place will able your body to fight the negative effects of stress much better.

So go to our Facebook page by clicking here. Write on our wall and promote us to your friends and save $25 off your next massage, it is that easy.

Zubio located in downtown San Francisco inside a mall, it just raised a second round of funding, according to VentureWire.

Dubbed as the potential “Starbucks of chair massage” The size of the new funding was not disclosed, but chief executive Sam Keller told VentureWire it was “not far off from” the $2 million to $5 million that he was targeting earlier. It comes from individual investors including Philip Schlein of U.S. Venture Partners, former Yoga Works co-chief executive Rob Wrubel, Gary Grace of Supercuts and Rob Wilson, president of Tiburon Research Group. Keller plans to go out for more funding to finish the round in June, and to open at least one more studio by the end of this year.

As someone who owns a massage therapy business as well, I am excited that companies like Zubio are not only succeeding but also attracting funding. Most might think that this kind of success from a competitor can’t help us as small business owners but it does, Zubio’s business model is different than what we have at RPM Therapy, so there is really no competition.

Plus Zubio’s primary business model is chair massage; this emphasis on doing chair massage helps our massage therapy industry as a whole, more than we think. You see chair massage as we all know, is one of the best ways to market your massage services, With this in mind, Zubio’s business model is reaching and marketing massages, to a group of individuals who might not have ever had a massage before. A massage chair and its convenience is enticing, especially if you had never had one before, being in in a public well-lighted atmosphere takes away why most individuals won’t get one. Mall goers need not to worry about getting un-dressed, having messy oils rubbed all over them or being too time consuming, as a regular table massage ranging 60 to 90 minutes, chair massage session on the other hand typically last only 10 -20 minutes in length.

Businesses like MassageEnvy (which btw I don’t agree with) and Zubio are paving the way for future massage businesses like RPM Therapy and yours to break into markets that ordinarily would be very time consuming and expensive. As they are already doing most of the leg work for us to follow in right behind them. They are getting pre-approvals and working out all the city licensing issues and requirements, not to mention all the marketing testing that these massage businesses are providing us. We should be applauding them, so that they can keep exposing more to people to massage, it is great for us a industry, even if they do a poor job at it (Massage Envy).

When Massage businesses like (massage envy) do not hold their own, in the market place, there will be room for another massage company with improvements and innovative services, to come in and take market share from Massage Envy. As Zig Ziglar quotes, “see you at the top”.