In the movie “The Usual Suspects” Kevin Spacey’s character Verbal Kint is a criminal who throws off the investigation by pretending to be a cripple walking with a strong limp. Spacey was able to achieve that limping gait by making one of his legs shorter than the other using a lower back muscle Quadratus Lumborum (QL), also called a hip-hiker muscle. The QL muscles (one on each side) play a very important role in our bodies. They allow us to flex our trunk to the side, extend

Here is a situation, which every massage therapist is very familiar with: a new client completes a medical questionnaire showing that he/she is in perfect health, no medical conditions, no injuries, surgeries, etc. And then you start asking direct questions, and suddenly hear: “Oh yeah, I had my ACL torn 2 years ago in a skiing accident”, or “I forgot to mention that I was rear-ended last year, and had a whiplash”, and on and on. It is my belief that clients often fail to ade

Remember how in the movie Alien, science officer Ash turned out to be an evil robot? Remember how after Sigourney Weaver knocked his head off, these strange thingies started falling out of him, which looked like enlarged lymph nodes, and this milky substance was leaking all over? Well, it turns out that we, humans, actually have similar-looking liquid inside of us, and it is called chyle (pronounced “kyle”). Chyle is that part of our lymph, which contains droplets of fat, and

I know what you are thinking: “here goes Ilya with another one of his obscure pop-culture references which he uses as segues into his blog posts. He’s probably going to talk about the movie “Falling Down”, which ostensibly shows the unraveling of Michael Douglas’s character, but in fact portrays the decay of the American society. But I am not going to mention any of that. Instead, let’s talk about how the long winter season is finally coming to an end, how the many sidewalks

The list is incomplete by a long shot: 26. Drain your congested sinuses. 27. Reduce your blood pressure. 28. Relieve constipation. 29. Feel better about your body and yourself... I could go on and on. And here is an observation: I noticed long time ago that when a massage is done and a client is getting off the table, his/her face looks different compared to when we started. I can't explain what it is. Relaxation, or pain relief, or just the fact that they've spent over an ho