Manage Your Workload Carefully

Be careful about taking on extra work in addition to your school or professional workload. Covering clients for a vacationing colleague, taking a hands-on continuing education workshop on the weekend or volunteering to provide massage for a sports event are just some of the situations that can add several hours of work to your normal weekly client load. While these can be great opportunities to learn new techniques or make extra money, the sudden increase in the time you spend intensively using your hands can overstress your hands and increase your injury risk. If you plan on doing extra work, either cut back on your normal workload, or build some recovery time into your schedule that week. Keeping the number of hands-on sessions per week constant and reasonable and making any increase in workload gradual rather than sudden will help you save your hands.

SOURCE: © Lauriann Greene, author of Save Your Hands! Injury Prevention for Massage Therapists (www.saveyourhands.com)