FAQ: About YoMaMa

What is YoMaMa?
YoMaMa is the union of yoga and massage, actually self-massage. By incorporating a massage tool as a yoga prop, your yoga students receive the benefits of massage and yoga. YoMaMa brings a new awareness to an ancient practice.

Who practices YoMaMa?
People who want to experience yoga and their bodies in an exciting new way.

Why Combine yoga and massage?
Merging yoga and massage delivers a deeper physical experience and a healthier practice. The combination of benefits will empower old students and attract new practitioners to your mats.

What are the advantages of YoMaMa?
Your students will receive all the benefits they’d normally get from yoga plus many of the most salubrious perks of massage, including:

• Relief from muscle pain and soreness
• Improved health and mood
• Increased energy
• Reduced likelihood of injury
• Improved knowledge of your physical nature
• Improved athletic performance and fitness
• Faster recovery time between workouts
• Reduced muscle tension and stress
• A trigger point release to your entire back body and feet

To learn more about the benefits of self-massage, see Chapter 2 of Self-Massage for Athletes, a book that serves as a resource for YoMaMa practitioners.

Does YoMaMa provide any other benefits?
In addition to the long term benefits of a yoga practice, YoMaMa packs a sensational short term benefit, an immediate sense of physical well-being. This benefit is measured by how much better practitioners feel leaving the class than entering it. Your students will walk out of class feeling as if they’ve experienced a full body massage and a yoga practice.

Is YoMaMa a form of therapy?
YoMaMa heals the body, mind, and spirit in a new immediate way by mating two of the oldest therapies in the world.

What form does it take?
YoMaMa is both a preventive and a remedial therapy. All active people sustain tiny injuries, of which they are largely unaware. Because yoga and massage can both prevent those injuries from growing, they are excellent preventive therapies.

How does YoMaMa work as a remedial therapy?
The goal of preventive and remedial therapies is similar. Both therapies prevent a medical problem from growing larger, while allowing the injury to heal. Preventive medicine corrects a problem before you’re aware of it. Remedial medicine is a post awareness therapy. As such, both yoga and self-massage help you stay healthy and become healthier.

How much class time will the massage component take?
As little as ten minutes or as much time as you like. The massage component is time well spent because it delivers benefits that would otherwise only be available through a massage therapy session.

Why is it called YoMaMa?
The practice is named YoMaMa because it combines one part traditional
yoga with two kinds of massage. The first massage component is the implicit massage that is traditionally part of yoga but is rarely noticed. For instance, in a seated pose when weight is brought to bear on your glute muscles and the muscles are moved they’re massaged. Many yoga asanas impart an implicit massage to your internal organs, especially twisting poses. The second massage component in YoMaMa is explicit and is delivered by a yoga prop or massage tool.

What does the massage tool look like?
The massage tool looks like a big blue “S,” standing for Super Yoga. It’s molded from a durable polymer composite and measures twenty inches long by ten inches wide, and weighs two pounds. At each end of the “S” is a small ball or knob which serves as a powerful massage tool. In fact, the entire prop can be used for massage. The serpentine piece between the knobs can glide over and compress muscles, to improve circulation and energy.

How does the tool work?
You can use the massage tool much as you’d use any other yoga prop to assist in asanas. The tool also gives you the power to deliver a complete back body massage in about ten minutes. Lying supine, your body will naturally relax letting you release trigger points and neuromuscular tension while restoring balance and energy. You’ll feel an intense and immediate release and will leave class feeling a sense of well-being bordering on euphoria. Students will attend yoga classes more often and bring friends to experience the wow effect of YoMaMa. Teachers will find their classes grow in size and will have to schedule more private sessions as more people are attracted to this new style of yoga.

How can I use the massage tool?
Lie on your back and allow your body to relax onto the yoga mat. Then place the end of the tool under your back body. Allow gravity to press your muscles onto the knob. The pressure releases muscle tension, stress, and trigger points while promoting chi balance. Then by moving the knob along the muscles in your back body a couple of inches at a time, first on one side of your body and then on the other, you’ll gradually massage points along your entire back body releasing waves of tension and stress. YoMaMa puts the power of massage directly in your hands.

How about my feet?
You can massage them using the little knob at the end of the tool. This too provokes a powerful release of energy. YoMaMa gives you the benefits of a foot massage without the costs.

When can the massage tool be used in class?
It may be used anytime but it should be used at least twice, once to massage your lower back body and feet, and a second time right before shavasana to massage your upper back body from your head to your glutes, along your erector spinae muscles, and the muscles around your scapula.

Can the tool be used at other times during class?
Yes the massage tool can be incorporated into yoga asanas just like other yoga props at your discretion. For instance, when balancing on one leg and extending the other leg straight-out in front of you, the tool can be used to both massage the foot of your extended leg, and support it. By pressing the knob into different points on your foot, you’ll get an intense foot massage and yoga stretch. The tool can also deliver a potent glute massage by balancing on one leg while folding the other leg on top of your knee and pressing the knob into your glutes. YoMaMa delivers an exciting new dimension to the physical experience of yoga.

Is the massage tool easy to use?
It’s easy to learn, and simple to use. Any yoga teacher trained as a YoMaMa instructor can lead you through the massage component effortlessly. YoMaMa is extremely easy to teach. If you teach yoga and are interested in teaching YoMaMa,contact us.

What does it cost?
You can get it online for between $30 and $40, and by delivering a constellation of massage benefits, it pays for itself in no time. So it’s cheap if you use it and expensive if you don’t.

Where can I get it?
The tool, called the Backnobber II is made by the Pressure Positive Company, can be purchased at their website www.pressurepositive.com or at Amazon. You can also use the Thera Cane® or Body Back Buddy™ massage tools.

Why teach YoMaMa?
It’ll attract more students to your yoga classes and private sessions because it provides a new and exciting experience for everyone. You’ll feel improvement in your own body and see it in your students. YoMaMa delivers the goods to students and teachers. For more information on YoMaMa contact Rich.

Hamstring Massage Video

This post is intended to be read before, during, or after watching the hamstring video Balls on Hamstring Massage with Tennis Balls: Do It While You View It.

Recommendations: You may want to warm up your hamstrings before trying this massage, it can be intense. The first time you attempt it, go easy. If your hamstrings are weak or injured try one of the alternative massages described below.

Accessories: You’ll need a chair with a hard seat and two tennis balls.

Objectives of the video: The goal of this massage, as always, is to feel better when you finish than when you started. To achieve that goal you’ll want to identify trigger points, areas of sensitivity, in your hamstrings and release them. It may take more than one session and more than one day. Be persistent. By releasing the latent trigger points that form in your hamstrings you will allow your muscles to regain their full strength and range of motion. That may not be the goal of your massage but it will be the result.

Trigger Point Advisory: Look for trigger points which have been described as points of exquisite tenderness when pressed. When you find one you’ll know it. You may want to stop the video and release it. If you continue with the video make sure you go back and work out the trigger points you discovered.

Alternative massages: Instead of doing the entire massage presented in the video, try applying just one of the five strokes shown at the beginning of the video. Choose the stroke you like best then begin massaging near your knees and work towards your glutes. Or if one leg needs more attention than the other massage it alone and devote all your attention to that leg. Or just put the tennis ball under a tender spot in your hamstrings and place your hand on your quads above the ball and move your hand in small circles applying pressure and massaging the trigger point until it releases.

Hamstring Described: Your hamstrings are made up of three tough muscles, more like thick ropes than strings, that live in the back of your thigh. They extend from your hips and seat to your your knees. They originate at your sit bone and the top of your femur and insert at the tops of your tibia and fibula.

Hamstring’s Purpose: Our hamstrings allow us to perambulate, without them we couldn’t stand, walk, or run, and the first 18 holes of golf would be even more painful than they already are.

Activities: When you bend forward from your hips to touch your toes, it’s your hamstrings that limit your motion and keep your head from hitting the floor. You can feel your hamstrings tightening when you attempt to perform a split. Your hamstrings are the muscles in the back of your legs screaming “STOP!”

Hamstrings and Trigger Points: Think of trigger points as another name for muscle dysfunction. Latent trigger points regularly form in the three muscles making up your hamstrings: biceps femoris, semitendinosus, and semimembraneous. Unless you regularly release these trigger points with massage they will weaken your hamstrings. If unreleased, trigger points accumulate over time and slow your running, shorten your jumping, and eventually make even walking painful. They have the affect of shortening your hamstrings which may be felt as knee or hip pain. You can see their affects on your parents and grandparents when they try to get out of a chair or walk. 


Hamstring Injuries: Hamstrings with accumulated trigger points are more likely to suffer tightness, strains, pulls, and tears. See http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00408

Benefits of Massage:
Massaging your hamstrings regularly will release latent trigger points and make your hamstrings less susceptible to injuries. Massage will result in stronger hamstrings and naturally faster legs.

Chronic Hamstring Problems: If trigger points are not released, over the course of a long life, they can produce severe muscle dysfunction which may be mistaken for arthritis. The weaknesses in elderly legs are often attributed to aging and are accepted as a natural part of the aging process. Most often it’s an accumulation of trigger points that are causing these problems, and as such it is a natural condition of aging that can easily be remedied through massage.

Trigger Point articles you might find helpful:
http://feelbetterfast.blogspot.com/2010/03/trigger-points-are-they-in-you.html
http://feelbetterfast.blogspot.com/2010/03/treating-your-trigger-points.html