Just Knead it: 4 tips to take care of your body

June 30, 2019

Meet the gorgeous Vicência Floris...

The only way to embrace life is to grab it by the horns and enjoy the journey. Let your passions and your inspirations govern your decisions. Take as much as you can from what life gives you, make as many mistakes as you can and don’t turn back. As humans, we spend so much time thinking about the impression we make, but it can prevent us from really sitting down and listening to our bodies, and minds, and souls about what energises us and what balances us.

As a therapist and as a regular day-to-day human, I thrive off growth. I am always looking for new knowledge and inspiration to evoke this within myself and to share with my clients. Life is too short to sit back and let the social norm take over. I love challenging expectations and letting my passions lead to my quality of life.

Vicência talks us through the importance of massage therapy

As a remedial massage therapist, I have learned that there is so much more to treating pain that meets the eye. Pain is a whole body response, it affects your thoughts, feelings, appetite, quality of sleep, rate of recovery and function of movement. All of this, in fact, can be holistically improved and in most cases reversed, by the quality and the specificity of the right treatment. Many of us can say that these factors of pain have affected them at some stage in one way or another. Which is why I focus so much on finding the trigger and cause of the symptoms to renew my clients' quality of life.

Coming from a dance and performance background, learning about the influence of pain in my own movement has made a huge improvement to my training on numerous accounts. Educating myself through my own course of prehab and rehab. I found massage gave me back so much quality of movement just from correcting the muscular tone in those dysfunctional muscle groups. As a performer, I like to think I practice what I preach, as I still utilise my knowledge and the knowledge of other allied health professionals including remedial massage therapy to ale my pains and niggles. I pride myself in having mentors in many different fields. It is such an essential part of my profession and my work in dance to continue my education in order to provide a current and proficient treatment.

Back pain and it's prevention

We have all had an instant where our back has prevented us from doing what we love or doing what gets us through every day. Pain can really put us out for a few days, thus it is so fundamental that we get familiar with our bodies to avoid and prevent symptoms from occurring. As you may know, this is by getting a thorough assessment and the correct education. There are many origins of back pain, some of the big triggers of back pain are desk work and manual strain from hinging from the waist. Remedial massage treatments are specific and target the cause of the pain. Treatments assist in alleviating the pressure on the joints by promoting balance between opposing muscle groups in muscular length and tone. Having screened the body’s movement patterns and quality of movement we can provide the correct treatment plan to bring the muscular system back to neutral balance. Neutral balance is all about giving the joint optimal musculoskeletal function free of pain and apprehension.

4 tips to work towards when taking care of your own body

Working towards your neutral posture, as I mentioned above, promotes balance within the opposing muscle groups and leads to the muscular and skeletal system working free of dysfunction. Meaning that when one muscle group is too short, it creates a lengthening effect on the opposing muscle groups. Eventuating in these lengthened muscles to working overtime to bring the body back to neutral because the shortened muscles have pulled the body out of this neutral alignment.

1.  Try not to over correct your muscle imbalance as it can send your body in the opposite direction. Which can, more often than not, cause other symptoms.
   For instance, if you’ve been screened for lower back pain and you’ve been told that one glute works more than the other. Don’t try to counterbalance that by only working your weaker glute. Begin with doing exercises that isolate your glutes; work one side at a time, but with even reps.
   
   
2. Don’t underestimate the power of your core.
   In Pilates, they initiate all movement including neutral spine activity through engaging the core to 30 percent. Engaging your pelvic floor or core more than 30 percent is considered bracing which can actually inhibit spine mobility. If you do pilates, don’t forget that your body is still present in your life outside of your pilates class. Initiating your movement by firstly lightly turning on your pelvic floor with improving and change the way you move throughout your day, and can even help you reverse bad habits
   
   
3. Find a massage therapist work towards finding the cause.
   When you have a therapist that is working towards eliminating your pain through treating the cause, they are aiming to have you out and about pain-free in the long term. There will be times where the site of pain or discomfort will be the cause, but if this is every single time, maybe its worth reassessing your treatments that you are getting the full benefit of hitting up the massage table
   
   
4. Reversing muscle tissue tone and length.
   Always warm up with dynamic stretches. Light stretching through movement. Don’t be shy to look up different dynamic stretched for different parts of the body.
   
   When managing pain with specific exercises, it will always work best if you do them first thing in the morning, before your body has time to latch back on to old firing habits.
   
   If you’re trying to achieve long term muscle length, always do it after your work out or when you know you’re not going to be staining your body anymore for that day as it can make your muscles vulnerable and potentially weaker. 

The white Palm Springs String fit were so streamline and really gave me that Brazilian booty effect! No peach photoshopping needed with those bottoms!

Bikini Featured - Palm Springs String/White

Rebeccas's Instagram: @cenzflo

Photographer: Lyndon Marceau - @Marceauphotography

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