Amy Bradley Radford (00:06.69)
Welcome to the Massage Business Success Podcast. I'm Amy Bradley Radford, Massage Therapist, Educator, and the creator of Pain Patterns and Solutions Bodywork. On this podcast, we talk about sustainable business, how to successfully work for yourself and pain management, what works, what doesn't, and why. Let's get started.
Amy Bradley Radford (00:37.912)
Welcome back to the Massage Business Success Podcast. I'm Amy Bradley Radford, and today I'd like to begin a conversation that I have been looking forward to for a very long time. So if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know we've spent a lot of time talking about massage businesses and building a career and working with clients and becoming better therapists. And every once in a while though I mention something called pain patterns and solutions or PPS bodywork.
You know, it usually comes up in a story from my treatment room or while I'm talking about one of my continuing education classes. And over the years I've had a lot of people ask me, Hey Amy, when are you gonna finally explain what PPS is? And you know, I've thought about that question more times than I can count. In fact, I've probably started this podcast series in my head a dozen different ways. I know I have at least nine podcast scripts that I kind of threw out the window.
as I started developing this one. And you know, every time I'd get a few minutes into working with it, I'd stop because none of the introductions felt right. You know, the obvious place to begin would be to just teach you about the system. I could start talking about inflammation and scar tissue and mapping or any of the techniques that have become part of PPS over the years. But every time I tried to do that, something didn't feel right. Something just didn't feel complete about it. And then I finally realized why.
And before I can explain what PPS is, I have to explain why I spent more than 30 years searching for this type of bodywork. Because the techniques the techniques inside of this aren't really the story. And the story is the journey of how I came to them. And I think if you understand the journey, everything else that follows would make a lot more sense. There's something else I'd like to tell you before we go any further, because I think it's important for you to understand where I'm coming from.
Some of what we're going to talk about in this series is going to sound different from what many of us learned in massage school, and I know that. I've known that for a long time. And if I'm honest, that's actually one of the reasons why I've waited so long to record these conversations. I am not someone who enjoys arguing or controversy, and I I really don't enjoy trying to convince people about something, and I've never wanted to rock the boat. That's never been my goal. In fact, if there's one thing I hope you hear throughout this series, and this series is
Amy Bradley Radford (02:56.6)
conversation we're going to have every month about PPS, it's how much respect I have for massage therapy and for the education that all of us received. I still use what I learned in massage school every single day. I still evaluate muscles. I still pay attention to areas of pain or trigger points or range of motion issues or movement or how the nervous system plays into it or if circulation is part of it. And all of those things were were things that we were taught to observe. And those things
Don't become less important because PPS came along. But PPS simply grew out of a different question, and we'll get to that question in just a little bit. But before we do though, I think there's one thing you should know about me. I'm not a scientist. I don't have a master's degree. I don't have a doctorate. I don't even have a bachelor's degree. I'm not working in some research laboratory or writing papers for medical journals. I am simply a massage therapist.
But I have spent more than 33 years standing beside a treatment table, listening to people tell me where they hurt, watching how their bodies respond to treatment, and trying to understand what those bodies were teaching me. For a long time I wondered whether that would make people dismiss what I had to say. We live in a world where credentials matter, and I completely understand why. Education matters, research matters.
And believe me, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people who dedicate their lives to advancing science and expanding our understanding of the human body. But my path was just different. My classroom was my treatment room, and my teachers were thousands of clients in their bodies. So everything I'm going to share with you in this series grew out of that observation. It grew out of paying attention.
Like really paying attention and asking questions and trying to understand why one client responded differently than another to the exact same technique. And refusing to stop asking questions when I felt like there was still something I wasn't seeing. You know, looking back now, I sometimes wonder if that different path allowed me to notice things that I might not have noticed otherwise. You know, I don't know. Sometimes I think when we go to formal training, we're also taught to think. And because I didn't go to formal training,
Amy Bradley Radford (05:11.67)
I let my mind create. And maybe it made a difference, maybe it didn't. I don't, I don't know. I just know it was my I just know it was the path my career took. And over time it led me somewhere I just never expected it to go. So the as the years have gone by, I've also realized something else about myself. When I was younger, I probably worried a lot more about whether people would agree with me. And I imagined having to defend my ideas, and I I imagined the criticism.
And I imagined all the reasons someone might tell me I was wrong. And somewhere along the way, I realized I was asking myself the wrong question. Today I care much more about whether something helps someone than I do about whether someone agrees with me. And when you're sitting across from someone who has lived with pain for years, and someone who's tried everything they know to try, and they've been to every person seeking help.
And now they're starting to lose hope because they don't know where else to turn. You know, your priorities become very clear, or at least mine did. And I knew exactly what I wanted to do. And I think at that point I stopped worrying so much about defending my ideas and became much more interested in just simply helping another human being. If something I observed helped a client find relief or it helped them move again, or it gave them hope, or changed the direction of their healing, then I believed it was worth something.
continuing to explore. And not because I thought I had found the final answer, but because I owed it to the next client who walked through my door to keep asking questions. So as we begin this series, I'm not asking you to agree with everything I say. I'm not asking you to replace things that you've learned. I am simply inviting you into the same journey I've been on for more than three decades. And that journey is where we listen and we observe.
All I'm asking you to do is compare what I'm sharing with what you see in your own treatment room and just keep asking questions because that is exactly how pain patterns and solutions began. And it didn't begin because I was trying to prove that I was right or that something I was doing was right. It began because I cared enough about the people lying on my table that I really couldn't stop looking for better answers. So if you've stayed with me this far, you're probably wondering: okay, Amy, what exactly is pain patterns and solutions? That's
Amy Bradley Radford (07:32.584)
actually a harder question to answer than you might think. And over the years I've realized that if I immediately start talking about scar tissue and inflammation and mapping, which are all things that we talk about in PPS, or any of the techniques that we use that make up PPS bodywork, people naturally assume I'm simply introducing another modality or another way to do massage. And that is not at all what PPS is. PPS is a different way of looking at the body. It's another lens.
And I know that phrase gets used a lot, so let me tell you what I mean by that. Years ago when I first started teaching PPS, I used to put one of those old magic eye pictures up on the screen, you know, the 3D ones where if you stared at it long enough, you could see a different picture. And, you know, at first it just looks like these random patterns and colors and shape and shapes, and people stare at it wondering what they're supposed to see. And
Some people can unfocus their eyes and see it right away. And some people never see it. And then all of a sudden someone in the room says, I see it. There it is. And what's interesting is that nothing about that picture changed. The image had been there the entire time. I didn't reveal it and I didn't create it. It simply was already there. The only thing that changed was how people were looking at it. And I've come to realize that that's probably the best way I know how to describe PPS.
I'm not trying to teach you a different body. I'm trying to teach you to see the same body differently. You know, I have another story that also helps me explain PPS. And my aunt is a brilliant watercolor artist. And I took art lessons from her when I was 11 and 12 years old. And one of the things she taught me was the idea of negative space. And she told me that if all you ever see is the object you're trying to paint, you miss half of what's actually there.
You have to learn to see the space around the object because that space gives the object its shape and its relationship to everything else around it. And you know, at the time I thought she was just teaching me how to paint. And one day she gave me what I thought was the strangest drawing assignment imaginable, and it had to do with negative space. She asked me to draw a chair, but she asked me to draw the chair by drawing the air around the chair.
Amy Bradley Radford (09:51.842)
And I remember looking at her thinking, how do you draw air? So she placed a chair a sh a short distance away from the wall and turned a light toward it so you could see shadows. Then she told me to leave the chair completely white on the paper. And my job wasn't to draw the chair at all. My job was to draw everything around it and then leave the chair white so that the space made the shape of the chair. And you know, at first it made absolutely no sense because I kept looking at the chair.
That's what I thought I was supposed to be drawing, and every instinct I had told me to focus on the obvious. But little by little, as I began paying attention to the empty space instead of the chair itself, something amazing happened. The chair appeared. I had scribbled in all of the air, it was all dark, and the chair was white. And I had drawn the chair shape by drawing the air. You know, looking back.
I understand she was teaching me something much bigger. She was teaching me how to observe. She was tell she was teaching me how to see all the pieces that you have to understand in order to replicate it into a a drawing. She was teaching me that sometimes the thing you're trying to understand isn't found by looking harder at the obvious. Sometimes it's found by paying attention to what you've been overlooking all along. And I realize now that she was teaching me how to observe many different things.
All at the same time that we just don't normally notice, or we might even take for granted, or we might even not even realize they exist. And I didn't realize until much later that PPS was asking me to do exactly the same thing. Most of us are taught to look at the obvious when it comes to the body. Where is the pain? What's the name of the muscle that's involved? Where is the trigger point? How much restriction is there? Those are all great questions. And I still ask every one of those. But eventually I found myself wondering.
If I was only looking at the object. And if pain continued to come back, what was I not seeing? What relationship was I missing? What if the painful muscle wasn't the whole story? What if it was responding to something else I just couldn't see? And that question slowly changed the way I practiced. One of the places you're probably going to notice the biggest difference between traditional massage and PPS is in where we actually place our hands and what tissue we're trying to change.
Amy Bradley Radford (12:17.132)
When I went through massage school, I was taught, just like all of you, to work with muscles. We learned origins and insertions, muscle actions, trigger points, range of motion, and all of the different ways we could affect muscle tissue and types of techniques to affect muscle tissue. However, we were also taught not to rub directly over bone. And if the goal is to work with muscle, that makes perfect sense. Bone wasn't the tissue we're trying to change. You can't change bone. It was something we worked around unless we were
Paying attention to an attachment point or a tendon or an area where a muscle connected into it. And that is correct teaching for massage. And I think it was exactly right for the kind of work we were learning to do. The difference is that PPS g is asking a different question. When I'm working with PPS, I'm not only trying to help a muscle relax or reduce a trigger point or change pain. I'm trying to understand how force is being organized through the body.
And why the same pain patterns keep rebuilding themselves? Why does it come back? And once I started asking that question, I began finding that some of the most important tissue was not in the middle of the muscle at all. It wasn't muscle tissue at all. It was tissue that was over bone and around ligaments and tendons and within the fascia, because those were the places where I kept finding scar tissue that seemed to be acting like an anchor. PPS is not myofascial work.
We work with fascia, but we work with a different concept of scar tissue that forms on top of it. And that's probably one of the hardest things for therapists to accept when they first take a PPS class because when I tell them to work directly over a bone, their immediate response is I was taught never to rub on top of a bone. And you're right. If we're working the muscle, there's no need to rub on top of bones. But PPS isn't using the bone as if the bone itself.
Has the problem. Instead, we're working with the tissue that inflammation has built over and around these structures because that tissue can become part of the way that the body organizes force, creates stability, and eventually contributes to recurring pain. And that is a very different goal. And when the goal changes, the places we pay attention to change as well.
Amy Bradley Radford (14:36.334)
And I know that may sound unusual the first time you hear it, especially because it challenges something many of us were taught very clearly. I'm not asking you to decide today whether you agree with me. I'm just asking you to become curious because curiosity is where PPS began. And I don't teach therapists to memorize pain patterns, I teach you to see them. And learning to see PPS is no different than that 3D image. You have to focus on something different to finally see what it is you need to see.
And if we were taught to stay away from these these anchoring structures, these bones, these ligaments, these this fascia, then how would we ever know that those areas were contributing to the problems we were working with? You know, there is something that happens in every hands-on class I teach, and after all these years, I still love watching it. I'll be working with a student, a professional, at the table, and
They're concentrating so hard on what they're feeling underneath their hands and they're trying to make sense because these are different structures that we're working on. And they're they're trying to connect what they already know with what they're beginning to feel a little differently. And then almost always they stop for a second and they look back at me with this smile on their face and say, I see it. I understand what you're talking about now. I worked this area, the spine of the scapula, the ulna bone, the cranial fascia on top of the skull.
And all of a sudden the muscles melted in ways that I've never been able to get them to change. And I love that aha moment. I never get tired of that moment. And it's not because they finally understood something I explained to them, it's because they experience it for themselves. And nothing about the client changed. The body hadn't changed. Scar tissue didn't didn't suddenly appear. The therapist simply knows what they're looking for now.
And from that moment forward, everything else we study begins to make so much sense because I'm no longer trying to convince them of anything. I'm simply helping them build on something that they've already experienced now with their own hands. And that is really how I want to approach this podcast series. These PPS podcasts that I want to do every month. I don't want this to be another place where you come to collect a technique or memorize information. I want to expand your mind.
Amy Bradley Radford (16:54.762)
And my hope is that each conversation simply gives you another way to look at the body. One observation builds on another, and one story builds on another. And I have so many stories to talk about how clients changed my way of thinking, how pain and actually reducing pain and helping the body heal itself really changed how I thought about the body. And I hope this builds until one day you're standing beside your own treatment table.
And you notice something you've never noticed before. And maybe you'll ask a different question. And maybe you'll follow something you would have normally ignored. And maybe you'll feel a different relationship with your hands that you've never felt before. There's more to the body than we really understand. And there's so much more to learn. And then, you know, maybe without even realizing it, you'll smile to yourself and think, okay, Amy, I see it.
Because I'm here to tell you, once you begin seeing the body this way, it's very difficult to go back to seeing it any other way. My clients say it's like opening Pandora's box. Once you've seen inside of it, you can't shut it. And you know, one of the stories that always comes to my mind when I think about learning to see, learning to really see, happened years ago with a client who came in with one of the worst rhomboid trigger points I'd ever felt. And
She was in so much pain, I could barely touch this area without her wanting to cry. And so I did exactly what I had been taught to do. I worked through the muscles that might be contributing to this problem. I tried to work through her pecs, thinking it could reduce the tension pulling her shoulder forward. And then maybe that rhomboid would begin to relax. I worked around her scapula on the opposite side. Maybe there was some antagonist agonist relationship that was.
Shifting the scapula so far laterally that I could get it to move back. And you know, I worked through everything that I understood based on the education I had at the time, but nothing changed. And everywhere I touched, it hurt, it burned. And it was like I couldn't touch anything in the front, above it, below it, around it, antagonist, agonist. I actually went to the opposite side and tried to take pressure off the left side to take pressure off the right side. And everywhere I touched seemed to just
Amy Bradley Radford (19:08.814)
create more pain and it made that area more painful. And the more I worked, the more I I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. And I remember standing there thinking, maybe I need to get further away from it. And so then I decided to go down towards her hip. And that didn't work either. And so then I decided to go all the way to her foot. And you know, muscles are a chain reaction. We all can agree with that. It starts on, you know
Something in your foot can have a chain reaction all the way up to your head, you know, the hip bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone's connected to the ankle bone and so on and so forth. And I thought, well, maybe something really far away is pulling on this. And so eventually I I just went down to her foot and interestingly enough, that actually seemed to help. But it wasn't her calf and it wasn't the muscles that helped. It was the planar fascia and it was the outside of her fibula.
That was helping. And so I just I I didn't question it. I just kept working on it. I was working on the Peroneus group or the fibularis group, as some of you call it, and I was rubbing on the bone. I was literally working the bone over. And she's like, okay, I think that's helping a little bit. And then I decided to just continue on that train of thought. So I decided to come up and head into her IT band. And I was really paying attention to what I was feeling on underneath my hands instead of trying to force the muscles to do something.
And when I got into her IT band, somewhere towards the bottom of that band on the anterior side, something happened that I had never experienced before at the table. This client reached one arm back behind her and touched me and said, Stop, just stop right there. And I honestly thought I'd hurt her. And instead she turned her head and said to me, Whatever you're touching on the outside of my leg, I can actually feel it going into my back. And it's making that area relax.
And I I remember just standing there for a moment because I had absolutely no explanation for what she had just told me. I thought maybe it was some myofascial connection or you know something. And I'd never taken myofascial work. I was a trigger point therapist. And everything I understood at that point told me those two places shouldn't be related the way she was describing them. But there it was, and she could feel it. And I visibly watched that area go down in her back. It decreased in size, it flattened out and relaxed.
Amy Bradley Radford (21:28.896)
And she literally had tears of relief saying, No one has helped me with this spot. And you know, the body didn't seem to care what I thought should or shouldn't be connected. So instead of dismissing this idea because I couldn't explain it, I became really curious about it. So I explored that area of her IT band and I was exploring it in a way of feeling differences in tissue tension or thicknesses or whatever was going on. I wasn't trying to just break down tissue and create a change. And I was very careful.
And as I was moving around, I found a place where she had had an old injury, and there was a significant amount of scar tissue there. But but what surprised me the most was when I found that area, it didn't hurt at all. Everything else I had touched on to her had varying levels of burning and hurting, and I couldn't, I couldn't do anything. But this area was numb. And she even said, I can't feel that at all. And as I slowly kind of
went around the edges of this on our IT band, I was asking her questions and she could tell me when it was coming alive and and then I would go back again and then it was numb. And so I kind of found the edges of of this scar tissue on this IT band, towards the front of her IT band, kind of lower by her knee. And I just kind of created a surface area. And then I started breaking all of this area down and getting it to come alive. Just just enough that it but it stretched out and allowed the area to kind of expand.
And as we worked through that, I watched her back go down further. And I never touched her back. And I was standing beside her leg. And and that moment stayed with me for more than thirty years because it's and it's not because I suddenly understood what happened, I had no clue. If anything, I walked away kind of confused, but I also knew I couldn't ignore what I just saw. There was clearly a relationship between those two places that I couldn't explain with the understanding I had at the time and
Looking back now, I don't think that was the day I discovered PPS. I think it was the day I realized the body was showing me relationships and relationships I hadn't learned yet, and I hadn't learned to see them yet. And that one client changed the questions I began asking every client after that. Instead of assuming that pain is just in the area it is, or assuming that there's antagonist agonist relationships, I started looking for those dynamic relationships in
Amy Bradley Radford (23:50.528)
Everywhere I worked, and the more I looked, the more I could replicate that same process with different types of areas of pain. I took that rhomboid IT band concept and started applying it to all of my clients. And lo and behold, it started working for a lot of different people. Just a quick note. If you want to actually see how I teach pain patterns and solutions, I'm sharing most of that work on YouTube now.
You can search my name, Amy Bradley Radford, and start wherever you're curious. Okay, let's get back to the conversation. And it just took me on this journey of trying to understand the body from a completely different perspective. So, where did all of those clients' histories and those questions I asked? Where did all of that eventually lead? Well, that's actually one of my favorite parts of this story because I wish I could tell you there was one afternoon where everything suddenly made sense and
Boy, I wish I could tell you that there was one client where I finally understood what the body was trying to show me. And PPS was born. But it really wasn't like that at all. It happened so slowly. And client by client and note by note, and really tracking how things worked with people over years, years and years of clients, years and years of hands-on work, years of frustration and years of, you know, aha moments. And it was so fascinating how.
One client would come in with a problem and then all of a sudden I'd have five or six people with the same problem so I could practice it and practice it and practice it. And that's really how PPS grew. I called it my matching game for a long time. You have this trigger point or this area of pain, here are the pieces that let it go. And, you know, I really thought of it that way for a long time, but that's not actually how it works. It it's a much deeper, intricate system than that and simple all at the same time. And you know, every client that I worked on
Kind of left me with another question. Instead of feeling frustrated by that, and that's a that's a pure outlier right there. I felt frustrated a lot of times. There was a lot of times I took all of my note-taking and everything and threw it in a box and stuck in the closet because it was just hard. It was hard to learn through my hands and make sense of what I was feeling instead of maybe having somebody just show me. But after a while, I found myself becoming more interested in finding those answers. And I started collecting what I called my solutions.
Amy Bradley Radford (26:12.726)
Not because they were not because I thought they were always the answer, but because they helped me think differently and they worked for, you know, eighty to ninety percent of the people I use them on. But I have to tell you something about my clientele. My clientele was a full clientele of people that couldn't find help. It was a different type of clientele. And you know, when I teach classes and people come to my classes, it's interesting because a lot of times they're there for one of two reasons. Number one, they're trying to learn how to help themselves.
They're hurting. And everything they're doing is continuing to make them hurt. And they need to continue to they want to continue to be a massage therapist, but they're in pain. And everything they're doing is putting them in more pain and they're looking for an answer. And then the other reason they come to my class is let's say they have, you know, 40 clients, and there's three clients they can't seem to figure out. No matter what they do, they can't get better. That's what they want. That's the answer they want in my class. I call it client A and client B.
Client A responds beautifully to the work that you have been trained to do. Client B does not respond beautifully. It backfires. You don't know what to do with them. They don't get better. They inflame further. Everything's a problem. That's what this work is for. It's for client B. I'm client B. The people coming to my class looking to help themselves are client B. And those three people out of 40, or those three people out of 10 that you don't know what to do with, they're client B. And client B is somebody who can't get out of inflammation. And
PPS, as I said in the last podcast, is the most interesting thing. We work with inflammation through the tissue it creates, and that's scar tissue. And so we're working with another system that's put together in ways that we never really understood. And it uses tissues that we're not taught to work on, bones and ligaments and fascia and all of that kind of stuff, in combinations that match physics. For a reaction, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So
All of these pieces have come to me over 30 years of observations. And I finally got to a place where I would step back and I would stop thinking and I would try and see that picture, that 3D picture. What is the body really trying to tell me that I haven't seen yet? And if I gave it enough time, I could see what it was trying to say. You know, after a while, there were so many fl things floating around in my head and so many papers.
Amy Bradley Radford (28:38.156)
With ideas floating around that I I finally had to get everything out of my head and put it onto paper. And that's really where mapping began. And mapping is a concept where we basically take a pain pattern, which is more than just trigger points. It's it's every type of pain pattern in the body that's you know, decreased range of motion or tendinitis or you know, all of those sorts of things. Every everything a
bulging discs, spondylolithesis, TMJ, everything that we call pain in the body. And I started taking all of them and laying them out so I could see the solutions that went with each one of them and start creating like a binder of information. And I just started to do this be and I I wasn't trying to invent a system. I was just trying to come up with a way of remembering what the body had taught me. And I was trying to sort it, sort it into different areas that made sense to my brain.
And all of these maps came from from ways that I started charting clients' charts. I, you know, I I had all my clients draw their pain on their charts. But then after I was done working with them, I would actually draw in a different color all the areas that I worked that created change in that place. And I started taking those maps and similar problems and started matching them up and saying what was similar between this body and the next. And it became they started to sort themselves into
types of ways of treating people for those those types of pain patterns. And that's what mapping is. Mapping is learning how to read pain and know where to go and and know the places that create the most dynamic change to pain. Because if if pain doesn't resolve from working directly on it and it comes back again, then you have to look at what's creating it. And that's that takes you on a little bit of a different journey. You know
looking back I realized I I don't know that I was really creating a system. I was just documenting observations and just trying to understand why certain patterns kept repeating from one person to the next and the only way I knew how to do that was to write them down. And so over time all of these sketches and notes and everything I was taking with my clients, they started to become consistent and the lines started repeating. And the same areas of scar tissue kept appearing and the same compensation patterns kept showing up. And eventually I found myself
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laying one client's body diagram next to another client's body diagram, looking for anything that repeated, and it was there. And that and you know that's probably the best way I know how to tell you how PPS developed. It it was it was built because it wasn't built because I had the answers. It was built because I kept having questions. And I kept thinking about that rhomboid trigger point and that IT band. And every pain pattern that is stuck in inflammation has one of those solutions.
We just have to figure out what it is. And the more questions I asked, the more diagrams I compared, and then I realized I wasn't looking at muscles anymore. I began seeing relationships. And I and I don't mean relationships in some abstract way. I mean relationships that I could consistently observe under my hands, drawn out on paper from client to client with the same problems. All of those things were no longer isolated clients with isolated problems. They were becoming patterns. And once I started recognizing those patterns, I couldn't unsee them.
And now you know why I call this paint patterns and solutions. It's Amy's matching game. That's when I realized something really important. The body had been communicating with me all along. The body communicates with all of us. I simply had to learn how to have a different conversation with it. You know, and as I kept making those observations and comparing one client to the next, I also started noticing something I think every massage therapist has experienced.
And that's when you work on a muscle and while you're working on it, you can actually feel it change and soften under your hands. And then in that same session towards the end of it, or as the client gets off the table, or a day or two later, the pain comes right back in the exact same place as it was before. And if you've been practicing for very long, I'm guessing you've had that happen to you too. I and and
For a long time I simply assumed it meant I needed to be a better therapist. I needed more techniques. I needed to understand some things differently. I needed to know how to approach this pain at this way with this pressure for longer periods of time or less period of time or work, you know, more antagonist agonist relationships or or something. I was just missing something. I don't think that's an unusual way to think because that's exactly what massage school teaches us to do. If something isn't working, we learn another technique. We appro we improve our assessment skills. We take another continuing education class.
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We come up with a new we we come to the table with more ideas and we become more skilled in our hands. That's just how we improve ourselves. So that's exactly what I did. I kept learning and I took class after class, believing that every instructor I studied with, you know, could give me another way to help the body or another way to approach pain and another technique that I could stick in my little toolbox. And looking back, I don't regret any of that, but there was one particular continuing education class that stopped me from going to continuing education classes. And it was a medical massage symptom.
And we were learning neck pain, you know, neck trauma. And I thought maybe I just needed to become a medical massage therapist and get all the certifications and certificates and, you know, all of those things. And as we were going through class, we were learning how to trigger point, you know, SEMs and trapezius and do deeper work with the cervical spinal muscles, you know, and all of those things. And many of the people that left it was a two day class and many of the people, myself included, that left class that night had a horrible headache. And we were in a lot of inflammation and pain. And
The teacher told us, you know, go home and ice because it's gonna you know, you're gonna be tender and that sort of thing. But when we came back to class the next day, there were a lot of people that did not feel well at all and didn't want to participate anymore. And we were trying to learn, you know, this finish this class and have these techniques so that we could work with our clients. And I started working on the person I was trading with at my table and I started to do s some of my solutions work and they immediately started feeling better and I wasn't anywhere near their neck.
And the person next to me was like, Hey, what are you doing over there? And I was just talking to him, telling them what I was doing. And they're Hey, can you help me? Because my head really hurts. And so before I knew it, I was teaching. I was helping people change the pain in their neck, not working their neck. And at that point the teacher came over to me and she pulled me in the hall and she said, You're embarrassing me. And I need you to stop and I need you to do exactly what you're told. And I realized at that point that
I was learning what I needed to learn from my clients on my table. And I had no business being in a room if I wasn't going to you know, comply with what was going on. I had no business doing that because what they were offering was very valid. And I, in my attempt to help, was creating issues. And so I decided at that time that I was probably done going to classes and then I started creating my own classes. And that was probably about twenty years ago, a little over twenty years ago.
Amy Bradley Radford (35:39.788)
But you know, every one of those classes shaped me in some way. And I still use things I learned from those classes every day. They gave me the foundation that I stand on. And PPS would never have existed without that foundation. But even with all of that education, there was still something I couldn't explain. And there's still something people couldn't explain to me. Why does the pain come back? Why would I spend an hour helping a muscle relax only to have that same muscle tighten right back up again? Or have the client come in week after week, twice a month.
Committed to me helping them and six months later it's still not any better. They just have learned to depend on me, which is great for my business, but they've just learned to depend on me to try and manage it. But it never truly got better. And why did that happen over and over and over again? What did I missed? What hadn't I done? Did I need to give it more time? Did I need to combine something else together? That was the question that kept going through my mind. And you know, there's a hundred different reasons I could come up.
up with and every one of those reasons pointed back to me needing to do something differently. And then one day, you know, one day it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't just asking maybe I just wasn't asking the right question. Up until that point, I had always focused on the muscle itself. You know, as as this whole process evolved, I struggled going back and forth between my little solutions and regular body work. It was like this conflict in my brain all the time. And it took me a while
To take a step back and realize that it wasn't about me, it wasn't about the technique, wasn't even about my client. It was about what helped them get better. You know, one day I remember that I stopped looking at the muscle as it like it was malfunctioning. I and I use muscle loosely, anything that stays in pain that we can't seem to change. And I began to wonder if what it actually was doing was what the body was asking it to do. What it what if it was sacrificing itself? What if it was
the end of a result and it couldn't change because it was the end of it and we had to find the beginning. You know, we always talk about cause and effect and and I understood that, but what if cause and effect meant something different than I understood? And that thought stayed with me for a long time. And every time a client came back with a tight muscle, I I'd think about it again. What if this muscle can't relax? What if it has to tighten back up? Or what if it's going back into that position because it's being told to? And maybe that muscle is telling me what the body is doing.
Amy Bradley Radford (38:09.548)
And I started asking myself, you know, what what do I need to do to change that muscle? What do I really need to do? How far away do I need to go? What combination do I need to do? How far away, in order to create that change? And that's really where my thinking started changing. The client that really changed my approach to PPS, which finally answered some questions about what was the driving force? What was it that always made that muscle go back into that state where it was in pain?
I actually had a client that was referred to me that, I worked with a Obigani doctor in our in our town quite a bit and he sent a lot of women to me with headaches. And he would tell them, I can't tell you what she does, just get a massage from her and she'll figure it out. And that was just a funny way to do it because sometimes people would come in and I would never work on their head. I would work on all kinds of different things to
I'd played my little matching game because I knew what relationships would work and people would walk away and go, I feel so different and so much better. And I have no idea what you just did with my legs that made my neck feel better. And he sent this woman to me that had been in a car accident and she was really struggling to find pain relief, even though she was taking medicine and, you know, going to PT and some different things. And what had happened is she'd gone through the windshield of her car and she had eleven fractures in her skull and and several of those were around her eye socket.
And he told me when he sent her in, he had his secretary call me and say, You cannot touch anything above her clavicles. You can't I mean, this is where all her pain is, but you she's unstable. I need you to not touch anything. In fact, I'd almost prefer you stay in the lower part of the rib cage just because I think anything we do is traumatic to her healing process. And I said, Okay, I can do that. and she came in and it was a really serious thing.
In fact, in our second session, she went to sneeze and she's like, Just give me a minute, give me a minute. And she had to hold her eye in her eye socket because the first time she sneezed, she ended up having to go to the ER to have him kind of shove her eye back into the socket. And that was that was a little alarming. But you know, I kept thinking about at when she came in, I was like, Well, if we deal with equal and opposite reactions in the body and you're wanting to change something dynamically, then of course I'm gonna spend an enormous time in your feet and I'm going to be very tedious.
Amy Bradley Radford (40:28.716)
And I'm gonna break down anything that existed in your feet before. I'm gonna look for scar tissue on all of the bony surfaces. I'm gonna change everything I possibly can lower to take the pressure off upper. And it worked. It worked amazingly. And because she was in an acute phase of inflammation, meaning that her body was currently building scar tissue, you can't change scar tissue that is hasn't been built. You can't change it while it's building because it doesn't exist yet. And so
I found myself working through her feet and and breaking down anything I possibly could and from session to session, you know what happened? Her body was building more scar tissue in her feet as her head was healing. I was observing heavy thicknesses of things coming back every week when she would come in to see me. And I thought, you know, this is really interesting that as she's healing somewhere and building scar tissue, she's building a pair of it somewhere else in her feet.
And I could keep her pain under control as we worked through her feet. And it extended into her IT bands and then, you know, some sacral ligaments and some different things like that. But just observing how aggressive her body was being in trying to maintain equal and opposite reactions helped me understand something about how physics fits into how scar tissue forms and why it forms and the thicknesses it forms and where it forms.
Because physics is all about in the human body, it's about balance and equality and making sure that your body is is opposing gravity effectively. And then because this woman had damaged her eye socket, when things healed, when I was slightly lower than the other, and I got to understand what the horizontal plane meant, I, as soon as this woman went through kind of her acute phase healing and started going into chronic phase.
I watched her body twist into scoliosis so that her eyes were straight and her body was crooked. And I came to understand that that horizontal plane was the driving force behind why pain came back. You see, our bodies, our bodies will adapt into, our bodies will do whatever they need to do for our eyes to be straight to run our brain, neurologically protected. We have to our eyes have to be straight.
Amy Bradley Radford (42:51.07)
And our bodies will twist around whatever whatever the eyes need, the body will twist around. And so I began to understand something about equal and opposite reactions, physics and force, patterns and and how really pain actually has two parts of scar tissue to it, two opposing forces, and the driving force behind that was was how the body perceived balance. And
You know, when that moment all came together for me, I began to be able to place all of these solutions into different categories. And they began to make a lot more sense. So I'm gonna stop right there because that's a lot to take on. And and you know, there's there's body work out there that has bits and pieces and parts of everything I'm talking about in it. But I've never found anything that talks about scar tissue building over and over again and the driving force behind pain.
being something rooted in physics and balance with scar tissue and inflammation being a much bigger system and a much bigger player in pain in pain in the human body. So, you know, now that I've taken you on this little journey and I've kind of taught you a little bit about opening your eyes and seeing a different picture and it being right in front of you, scar tissue is right in front of you. You just don't touch the bones and there it is. There's your answer and and expanding your mind.
And having you understand, you know, client B and inflammation and and then learning about mapping and solutions and all these things, you may have an idea of why it's hard to explain PPS. Because it's a much bigger, different concept than than what we're ever used to. I'd have to say that the people that have gone through my mentorship program have told me this. The hands-on work is easy. They've never had to think so hard in their life to really understand, you know, when they're looking at a client and they've got
14 or 16 X's on their body and all these areas of pain, how to look at that and go, what is the body trying to tell me? Where do I start and why? And what am I trying to change? And how do we kind of break open the system so that the body can start healing on its own? They tell me that their brain gets tired because that's actually, you know, the difference in PPS. We're we're perceiving what our hands say. We have information in our head, but we're really listening with our hands.
Amy Bradley Radford (45:13.782)
And creating a change in the body in a very dynamic way and changing where those eyes sit in space. So one of the things I wanted to tell you was I I have a whole bunch of videos. I have I have a lot of videos about PPS, hands-on work, skeletal anatomical, you know, that sort of thing. But they were a part of Amy that was a little too anatomical. I was just trying my hardest to be professional. And here's the reality of it: they are difficult.
They are not easy. And my goal with PPS in in the next decade is to make it as simple as possible. And so I have started refilming my hands-on work and I've made it more of a conversation and easier to follow and why we're doing things. And so I'm going to be placing some of that information on YouTube. And you can go watch it. Some of the first videos I'm going to add are I call it the C1 release technique, that occipital ridge that will not let go. We're going to talk about how you work through the face.
And the clavicle to get the occipital ridge to let go or that rhomboid trigger point IT band release. And there's a QL IT band release. And then we're going to talk about the big toe. my gosh, we're going to work over the big toe to change that little facet area at T12L1, the first rib, the one that's kind of goosey on some of your clients. We're going to talk about the rectus abdominis creating all of this pain, but how you get into real scars and scar tissue.
So there's a couple of things that I want to put on there. So you can play around with some of this and just start to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Start to see that 3D image inside of that picture that you've, you know, been looking at. And we'll just keep talking about it because honestly, I think the best way to talk about PPS is just to talk about it and not try and turn it into some huge process or class or technique. Because if you're gonna learn it the way I learned it,
And the way my mentees have learned it. It is one person at a time. It really is. And the more you play around with it, and the more you think about it, and the more you really observe what the body is doing, the more changes that you will see, and the more questions you'll have. So PPS is something I'm gonna talk about the second week of every month. And I'll be putting some more information out there and I'll let you know when there's more videos. And if you're really interested in learning this technique, because I know a lot of you on here are here for business.
Amy Bradley Radford (47:36.338)
And if you've noticed, I'm really unique with my business approach. Well, I'm really unique with my hands on approach. And the reason for this is I talk about the things that are real. I talk about the things that actually work. I don't blow smoke. If it doesn't work, I don't talk about it. And, you know, and I call these things universal principles. They work with whoever you work with them. Principles of business, getting clients on your table, setting up a referral system.
understanding how to increase your income and create a really amazing career out of massage and then also what to do with that client B because that client B is not going to respond like client A. And so there are some unique universal principles that you can learn to work with in order to create those changes. And you know I'm gonna tell you this one little piece. The most fascinating thing about PPS is it is a tool. It is not the answer. It is a tool. And the reason it's a tool is it has a very specific job and its job
Is to stop inflammation. And when a client has been out of inflammation inflammation long enough, the body will heal itself. And then over time you go back to regular massage. Isn't that fascinating? It's not something that you continue to use forever. It is a tool to find balance and change their body so the body can heal itself and then they can move forward again. And so there's another universal principle. It is not the answer to everything, it is the answer for some very specific things. So
Thanks for spending this time with me today. I could go on and on. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about. And I'm glad I finally started talking about it. So I will see you next week for a business podcast. I think we're doing an interview. It's a very great interview with a a member of our professional community. And next month we will continue learning to see the body a little differently. Have a great day.
Amy Bradley Radford (49:31.598)
Thanks for spending this time with me. If this episode was helpful, subscribing or leaving a review helps other therapists find the show. For classes, resources, and ongoing education, you can visit amibradleyradford.com or join my email list if you'd like to stay connected. Take care of your body, your clients, and your business. I'll see you next time.
