Obsessive Exercise Made Me a Better Massage Therapist

I became the therapist I needed when constant motion was my refuge

By Amanda Long

For the first seven years of my massage career, I gave advice I never followed: Rest, listen to your body, swim, know that you can’t just keep doing the same thing and expecting something different, like doing cardio daily and wondering why your ankle throbbed.

I was in my third decade of an eating disorder, one marked by overexercise, which helped me mask and present as a fit, healthy person, a massage therapist who understood the many running injuries and obsessiveness that pushes us past our limits. In running communities, that kind of mind set is celebrated. In my treatment room, I would offer a safe space that allowed the client to hold onto that identity and rest. Witnessing my clients heal when they rested, somehow, I could never allow myself the same grace. I saw my every injury as proof I was already broken, so why give up my coping mechanism?

I came to the massage through an injury. When I was 27, I broke my femur in a bicycling accident, hitting steel plates on the way to work, flying over the handlebars and thwacking my right leg into the trunk of a maroon Nissan. I was taking a rest day by biking to work instead of going to the gym twice, because. my R hip flexor was injured. No more than two minutes after I hit the ground, I was immediately in b series of good hands: the cops who stopped to call an ambulance (one took my bike back to my apartment), the EMT who told Me to yell my favorite cuss word when she straightened my leg, the ER nurse who called my mom and editor (now husband) and the orthopedist who expertly placed a rod in my leg. But the hands that helped me come back into my body were those of a PT and one helluva if a massage therapist at Athletico in Chicago. I didn’t stop over exercising then, but I did start seriously thinking about becoming a massage therapist.

In 2017, I checked myself into a residential treatment center for eating disorders, and my recovery has been like all healing: the opposite of linear. What it has done, however, has allowed me to connect with clients who have also long relied on their bodies as their only arena of control. They are afraid of aging (dying), of giving up their identities as a runner, or athlete, or person who always walks 12,000 steps a day. I mirror to them the cost of that obsession. I’ve lost teeth, a femur, hours of time with now-dead friends and family so I could be with my eating disorder and make it happy. I have never kept that cost a secret.

I gave up my smart watch two months ago, and the liberation is real. So was the fear at first that I “wasn’t doing enough,” that I didn’t walk enough steps to stop for food, or enjoy a seat in the sun with a friend. All of those revelations have informed how I talk to clients -- it’s softened me and opened them up to the spectrum many of us are on when it comes to exercise -- especially in this data-driven culture.

Massage is a door, a speaker, a way into being present with your pain and the message your body is always sending to you. Being nonjudgmental is always the goal, but being candid and super human about my own struggles with loving my body and being kind it has been a game changer. I see clients let themselves off the hook; I see the shame lessen, and that’s when we can work together more effectively.

I recently went to Paris for the first time in my life, a trip my eating disorder would have hated. I got a massage there from a therapist in her second year. She asked me for advice. I told her to protect her thumbs, get lots of massages herself, and always be real with clients because no healing can happen if lies and a fixer mentality are in the room.

Every body is aging, changing and coming up to the limits of what the mind demands of it. Massage reminds us we are one with our bodies, not at war with it. Being a massage therapist reminds me I’m not fixing anyone because no one is broken, just deserving of rest, care and presence.