Hands in NO HANDS

By Gerry Pyves, NO HANDS Founder & Creator

You could be forgiven for thinking that NO HANDS® Massage practitioners do not use their hands - after all, it's there in the name. However, this is actually a myth: in fact we are the only members of the profession protecting our hands for those moments when we really need them. 

Because we use other parts of the body and  because we use the therapeutic philosophy of WEIGHT which involves tissue compression and decompression on a scale hitherto unseen, there is no need to use the hands for pressure. This links to the SYSTEMIC IMPACT of NO HANDS.  

With such deep and powerful moves across the client’s body, most tension simply releases. This is as much due to the psychological impact of NO HANDS Massage as it is due to the physical pressures involved. Each muscle has three attachments: the origin, the insertion and THE MIND. It is the mind that is responsible for 80% of the body’s muscular tension. When you are being slowly and exquisitely flattened by the "Gentle Giant" that is NO HANDS Massage, the mind simply lets go.   

What we teach in NO HANDS Massage is to protect our hands for palpation and soothing reassurance. The human touch. After thirty years of practice, the hands of a NO HANDS Massage practitioner are as soft and sensitive as the day they started massaging. The only practitioners who will be free from injury (who still practise) will be NO HANDS practitioners. This is not a marketing claim - this is simply becoming a fact in the UK. 

The hands are of course the healing gazelles of the human body. Ancient sanskrit images show the hands as one of the many healing centres of the human body. Who would condemn the hands to endless injury scar tissue and arthritis? When I attend conferences I am painfully mesmerised by the swollen and inflamed hands of practitioners.  

I call the hands “Gazelles” because they are light and fey. They are designed for artistry not force. When we need hard work and lots of power, what we need is a SHIRE HORSE, not a Gazelle. We let the shire horse plough the fields, whilst the gazelle leaps and bounds across the fields in a glory of balletic magnificence. Yet what our profession has done is place a halter over the gazelle’s neck and whipped it into servitude. No wonder we have an industry wide “brain drain”. With NO HANDS Massage we use body weight as our SHIRE HORSE and allow the hands to do what they were intended to do: heal. 

NO HANDS®Massage is the most hand friendly approach the Massage profession has seen in over 2,000 years. This is why we can honestly call it zero strain - there is no possibility of injury to the practitioner.  

The zero strain nature of NO HANDS Massage is no claim. Anyone can write anything they want about “injury free techniques” and “proper body mechanics”. NO HANDS Massage can point to 3,000 therapists having successfully learned this powerful new approach to Massage. Not a single injury from their clinical practice has been reported by any of these practitioners. We are in regular contact with our students and NOT ONE has complained of a problem. I would not endorse the other techniques that I have seen that claim “zero strain” because they do not solve the full problem of zero strain Massage. It has taken over 25 years to develop a completely safe approach for Massage therapists. Many of the “solutions” I have seen touted around have not even passed first base in this complex subject. You can find out more about injury in the profession - including summaries of worldwide studies into this epidemic - in my Knowledge is Power series. 

But rest assured - protecting your career through learning NO HANDS does not mean saying goodbye to using your hands in your treatments. It simply means just that: protecting your career so at those moments when you need the "healing gazelles" that are our hands, you'll still be seeing clients and able to deliver that soothing reassurance your clients are desperate for. 

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