Massage Therapy Journal Summer 2024

Summer 2024 • 23

An aging cohort of affluent baby boomers is extending “middle age” indefinitely, and this population is showing up in clinical settings with a set of problems very well suited to massage therapy.

By George Russell

A mong the dilemmas of middle age is the balance between accepting limitation and soldiering on aggressively—the latter, at least in part, being a manifestation At the musculoskeletal level, a cardinal issue contributing to middle-aged injuries is that fascia shrink-wraps to match a person’s habits. The body lays down scaffolding, in the form of fascia, to match long-held patterns of movement and posture. In this sense, fascia is your history—like the fibrous rings of a tree—but it’s also your destiny because tightly woven fascia makes forming new habits difficult. Most of the problems people present with in middle age have to do with a loss of the subtle gliding movement that maintains proper joint position and mobility. Frozen shoulder, of many Americans’, and especially the baby boomers’, obsession with “more.”

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