A Preliminary Review of The Pressure Positive Company

by Paul Ingraham of SaveYourself.ca

I’m delighted to offer an uncharacteristically cheerful preliminary review of a massage tool manufacturer I really like: The Pressure Positive Company. In January, I’ll be publishing a full review of this unusual company and their products. For now, I’d just like to do a brief introduction:

Readers, meet The Pressure Positive Company.

The Pressure Positive Company, meet my readers.

What’s remarkable about Pressure Positive is a rare combination of sensible massage tools and classy, ethical promotion. Their website avoids the big promises and irritating hype that characterizes much of their competition. Instead, they offer substantive good quality information about myofascial pain syndrome. They don’t claim that their tools will “cure” anything — just help. They don’t bombard visitors with pseudo-scientific rationalizations for their products — they’re just massage tools, and that’s good enough.

This may sound unremarkable to you. But how much marketing email do you get from alternative health product makers?

The competition isn’t pretty

I get a lot of sleezy marketing email: email from dodgy companies marketing to health professionals, with crap websites and products that usually seem ill-conceived at best, dangerous at worst. Some are probably well-intentioned but desperately need to hire a professional web designer. Many are more like spammers who’ve decided to try their hand at marketing a “legit” product instead of penis pills.

Compared to all that … Pressure Positive is in a different league, the difference between a dollar store and Macy’s. Communicating with them has been a breath of fresh air in every way. When they contacted me, it was because they were genuinely interested in the science of manual therapy, public education, and the work that I’m doing here at SaveYourself.ca. Because of this, I have quickly come to appreciate them as more than just a maker of massage tools, but as a new partner.

Pressure Positive has been around for quite a while, since 1979, longer than any other massage tool manufacturer I know of. Their best-known tools are their oldest, the Backnobber® and Jacknobber®. And … the The Knobble® II. Oh, Knobble II® — where have you been all my life?

The Knobble® II in action. Massage tools don’t get much simpler than this, and I like that.

My favourite Pressure Positive tool so far is the $10 Knobble® II — which I used to save myself from a nasty headache about 24 hours after it arrived in the mail. Somehow Pressure Positive has managed to reinvent the wheel with this product. It seems to have an answer to that burning massage tool design question, “What is the best possible way to transmit force from the hand to a point without limiting the user to any particular angle or grip?”

The answer, apparently, is to make a good, grippy handle that perfectly fills the palm, and then extend it into a radially symmetric pyramid. Its symmetry is the key to its success, I think. Most massage tools (include several of Pressure Positive’s other offerings) are asymmetric, and the user must adjust it in relationship to the target. That’s not a bad thing: for some nooks or crannies of your body, the right asymmetry will be ideal. But the same tool will also be wrong for some other nook or cranny. But the Knobble’s symmetry makes it a beautifully grip-agnostic generalist of a tool; no matter what you’re aiming at, it grips the same way, which makes it feel much like a hand-replacement than a tool.

And why (why, why?) didn’t I have a tool already that I could drop the weight of my head onto? I have a large collection of tools, and not one of them allows me to settle my suboccipital muscles (Perfect Spot No. 1) onto a hard point. The simple, short, pyramidal shape of the knobble is stable under my skull; the point is bulbuous enough to take my weight, but sharp enough to deliver satisfying, focussed pressure. Weirdly, there just wasn’t anything else like this in my collection — yet it’s ideal for applying pressure to one of the single best targets for self-massage in the whole body.

I look forward to reviewing other Pressure Positive tools, several of which are equally well-designed.

About the Author:
Paul Ingraham of SaveYourself.ca is mostly the work of one person, me, Paul Ingraham, a health science journalist and former Registered Massage Therapist. From 2000-2009, I had a busy massage therapy practice in Vancouver, Canada, and published SaveYourself.ca in my “spare” time. Eventually SaveYourself.ca took over, and it is now a full-time job.

Trigger Point Therapy for Pain Relief

Trigger Point Therapy for Pain Relief, is it Your Missing Link?

Article Summary:

• Your body’s instinctive reaction to a harmful event is to protect itself.
• Trigger points are a type of muscle stiffness, usually in the lower back.
• To relieve the pain, a deep-tissue massage is recommended.

Research by Drs. Janet Travell and David Simons, authors of “The Trigger Point Manual,” has shown that trigger points are the primary cause of pain at least 75 percent of the time and are a factor in nearly every painful condition.

Trigger points, a type of muscle stiffness, are the result of tiny contraction knots that develop in muscle and tissue when an area of the body is injured or overworked. Trigger points are something traditional doctors ignore, but they could be the one thing that has been overlooked in your case for years, if not decades.

A hallmark of trigger points is something called “referred” pain. This means that trigger points typically send their pain to some other place in the body, which is why conventional treatments for pain so often fail. Many health care practitioners wrongly assume that the problem is located where the pain is and therefore fail to assess the body correctly to find the cause of your pain.

Trigger Points Are Tiny Contraction Knots That Develop In Muscle And Tissue When An Area Of The Body Is Injured.

I’m going to give you some valuable information about trigger points that I hope will encourage you to consider the possibility that trigger points may be the missing link in your quest for relief.

What Triggers A Trigger Point?
Trigger points can occur as a result of muscle trauma (from car accidents, falls, sports, and work-related injuries, etc.), muscle strain from repetitive movements at work or play, postural strain from standing or sitting improperly for long periods at the computer, emotional stress, anxiety, allergies, nutritional deficiencies, inflammation, and toxins in the environment.

A single event can initiate a trigger point, and you can suffer the effects for the rest of your life if that trigger point is not addressed properly.

Your body’s instinctive reaction to a harmful “event” is to protect itself. It does that by altering the way you move, sit, or stand, which puts abnormal stress on your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and joints. This produces strength and flexibility imbalances in your muscles, as well as postural dysfunctions throughout your body.

If that were not bad enough, your blood flow can become restricted and when that happens both your peripheral and central nervous systems will start to send out those “referred” pain signals, making assessment and treatment even trickier. That’s why some experts believe that trigger points are the beginning stage of fibromyalgia. Can things get even worse? Keep reading.

Here’s Why You May Be Suffering
To better illustrate the process, here’s an example of how one trigger point in one muscle can cause back pain, sciatica, or a herniated disc. The most common place for a trigger point is in the muscle of the lower back called the quadratus lumborum (QL), which is located just above your hips.

Regardless of what kind of event sparks the trigger point, your QL will gradually become dysfunctional – that is, the QL will tighten and shorten. And as you limit its use, it will weaken.

The Most Common Place For A Trigger Point Is In The Muscle Of The Lower Back Called The Quadratus Lumborum. As the QL becomes increasingly dysfunctional, it will alter the position of the pelvis. As the pelvis becomes dysfunctional, it will force the spine into an abnormal curvature that will put abnormal pressure on the disc. Over time, the disc will begin to bulge. This situation will get progressively worse, affecting your overall quality of life. Depression often follows. All of this from a single event that occurred in one moment in time.

How Do You Know If You Have Trigger Points?
 Everyone has trigger points; the question is degree. If you have lingering pain, tightness, or restriction of certain movements, it is a good bet that you are experiencing the effects of a trigger point. Trigger points may produce symptoms as diverse as dizziness, earaches, sinusitis, nausea, heartburn, false heart pain, heart arrhythmia, genital pain, and numbness in the hands and feet.

Trigger points can bring on headaches, neck and jaw pain, low back pain, sciatica, tennis elbow, and carpal tunnel syndrome – you name it. They are the source of joint pain in the shoulder, wrist, hip, knee, and ankle that is often mistaken for arthritis, tendonitis, bursitis, or ligament injury.

If you think this is overkill, I suggest you read the book “Why We Hurt: A Complete Physical & Spiritual Guide to Healing Your Chronic Pain,” by Dr. Greg Fors, in which he explains precisely why so many different conditions are rooted in trigger points.

Here are a few more symptoms you should know about:

• If you have restless leg syndrome, you have TPs
• If your teeth hurt, you have TPs
• If your workouts have plateaued, you have TPs
• If you have painful menses or irritable bowel syndrome, you have TPs.

How Does Trigger Point Therapy Work?

Simply rubbing the surface of the skin with a massage lotion, a vibrating massager – or using heat – will not change the tissue of a single trigger point. What it needs is sufficient deep sustained pressure to the “knotted-up area.”  As you work the Trigger Point, your body will undergo soft tissue release, allowing for increased blood flow, a reduction in muscle spasm, and the break-up of scar tissue. It will also help remove any build-up of toxic metabolic waste.

How Long Does it Take to Get Relief
The length of time it takes to release a trigger point depends on several factors, one of which is how long you have had your trigger point. Other factors include the number of trigger points you have, how effective your current treatment is, and how consistently you can administer or receive treatment.

Even if you are lucky enough to find a clinician who can properly assess your condition – let alone treat trigger points – it can be time-consuming and costly to pay someone to completely release all the primary, latent, and myofascial trigger points you may have in your body.  You can try going to a massage therapist, but trigger points are very fickle; they need to be addressed daily using a technique that will apply the pinpoint pressure that is needed. Most likely it will be impractical to see a massage therapist frequently enough to get a trigger point to release. The basic idea is simple. First of all, a trigger point is only about the size of a mustard seed, which is one of the tiniest of all seeds. The idea is to put sustained pressure on the area for a set period of time on a regular basis. There are a number of techniques out there that you can employ to do this. The bottom line is that you need to take the initiative. “There is no substitute for learning to control your own musculoskeletal pain,” says Dr. Simons. “Treating myofascial trigger points yourself addresses the source of that kind of common pain and is not just a way of temporarily relieving it.”

An Approach That Makes Sense

Related Back Pain And Injuries Articles:

• Keep Back Pain From Taking Over Your Life! – By Christopher Mohr
• Back Pain: How Exercise Can Help! – By David Robson
• Get Rid Of My Nagging Back Pain! – By Jesse Cannone
• Other Back Pain And Injuries Articles…

In other words, you can fix your own trigger points better than anyone else – once and for all. Dr. Simons has it exactly right: You must educate yourself about your condition and then apply what you’ve learned. This runs counter to today’s conventional wisdom, which says that whenever we have a health issue, we should find someone to take care of the problem for us.

*This article has been reprinted with permission of BodyBuilding.com Please visit BodyBuilding.com to access the links and videos included on their website.

Embracing the Tides of Change

Embracing the Tides of Change
by Rhonda Grace Sandhu

Is there any doubt that current times are influencing our health and well being in ways never seen before? As phases of the moon influence the tide, they affect life on the planet through weather patterns, animal migration and even land mass movement. Similarly, these historic economic times shift human patterns in physical, mental and emotional tides, often creating a heightened sense that the land beneath our feet is shifting. It is a new type of stress leading to new health conditions and a perpetuating cycle of concerns.

Our economic downturn simultaneously presents a catalyst to reform our healthcare plan. While we investigate what would work for us as a nation, we must consider what would work for each individual. We need an efficient and attainable plan that addresses individual needs and steers clear of cookie-cutter solutions that diminish personal choice. The United States has made progress by including some alternative modalities into new legistlation, such as massage and acupuncture, yet there is the need for much more.

Is there a way that we can use the momentum of this time and really put healthcare choices into our own hands? We could call it America’s Self Care Plan with the hopes that in the near future, our values of holistic modalities will be included in our healthcare system, creating more choices for all.

We must set the example and create the solution ourselves. Caring for the self starts before a doctor is needed by bringing awareness to our attitudes and actions. It involves a system that includes everything from stretching, nutrition, and hydration, to injury recovery, posture and overall daily wellness.

The simplest techniques to wellness are often overlooked because they are so easy. For example, breathing is something we do without thinking. However, when focused on, deep breathing can dramatically reduce physical stress on the heart and change the heart rate, in turn, affecting blood pressure.

Pain and stress are present as alarm systems that inform us when something needs to be changed. For example, if our back hurts from sitting at the computer all day, stopping and bringing awareness to our posture and adding a stretching routine may break the cycle of pain. Self care can be that simple. In the long term, as confirmed by Dr. Matt Sanicki of Chiropractic Release and Acupuncture Center in San Diego, this practice can even prevent degeneration of our skeletal structures and dramatically reduce the risk of nerve damage.

Most importantly, self care includes working with, managing and being able to change physical, mental and emotional patterns that do not serve our highest health goals. The first step to creating a self care system is the awareness that implementing one is necessary in the first place. The second step is researching and finding holistic health models that serve our individual purposes. Adjusting unhealthy habits—whether they concern our diets, exercise patterns, or emotional tendencies—and adopting new patterns that promote daily health can be easy once we make the choice to do it.

Once individually examined, awareness and accountability are the cornerstones that support a healthy model resulting in the most powerful of changes. The physical body is made up of an amazing circuitry that informs us of its needs. Self care starts with tuning into our intuition. If we listen, instead of ignoring the signs and going about our daily routines, we will know when change is needed.

We are fortunate in that if we seek out holistic health modalities in our country, we will find them. As a Holistic Health Practitioner in the field of bodywork and a student for 13 years, I am amazed at how many healing modalities are available. Holistic health professionals such as naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, herbalists and nutritionists are becoming more popular in today’s western world. We have many available models in our multi-dynamic culture that help us to increase awareness, support prevention and provide solutions for day-to-day wellness.

Holistic modalities are even entering the field of allopathic medicine. A western medical doctor by the name of Dr. Janet Travell worked with President John F. Kennedy to relieve his back pain with her form of Trigger Point therapy. Trigger points are pain patterns between the musculoskeletal system and the nervous system that can be interrupted. Dr. Travell created and implemented this therapy using anesthetic injections on trigger points in the body to relieve pain. Her technique evolved to a manual touch therapy known as Neuromuscular Therapy (NMT), which is currently used without injections by massage therapists to similarly deactivate trigger points in the body.

Though massage therapists are not doctors and would not diagnose an illness, they are great resources to call upon for wellness tips as a part of a holistic health care team. Massage therapy is one example of alternative healthcare. Self care involves researching the options, speaking to wellness professionals, and selecting the course that is right for you.

Alternative plans involving self care can empower a nation in times of change and encourage a cultural attitude that takes more of a driver’s seat on the road of prevention. This can become a path to self-discovery—rather than turning solely to our political leaders for answers, we can lead ourselves. It is an opportunity to embrace the tides of change and implement a more accountable self care program within a healthcare plan that promotes a cultural sense of wellbeing. Self care can be attended to in our own corners of the world and someday it may be a part of a universal health care plan for us and for future generations.

Self Care Plan in Action

• Create Time for Yourself
• Make time to be present with yourself
• Find the right space to tune in
• Set a regular schedule that is realistic
• Design a Personalized Check-in System with:
• Habits
• Pain
• Discomfort
• Educate Yourself
• Research holistic alternatives
• Attend community health events
• Explore open houses for schools and clinics
• Connect
• Try a new modality
• Attend workshops
• Volunteer
• Be Patient with yourself
• Set aside funds for self care as best you can
• Treat yourself as you would like others
• to treat you and pass it on!

About the Author
Rhonda Grace Sandhu is a Holistic Health Practitioner who teaches at the International Professional School of Bodywork and leads wellness retreats. Learn more at www.bajawellnessretreat.com or contact info@bajawellnessretreat.com or 888.774.7887.