Massage is Bad for the Environment

Massage is Bad for the Environment
or: Deep Tissue Work and Your Carbon Footprint

Hold your mouse over each link to see illustrations. If nothing pops up, then try clicking! - Enjoy!

Massage Therapist	Rossiter Coach
30 minute Deep Tissue Massages working a specific region for pain & tightness on each client. Relaxed, but full schedule.	15 minute Rossiter Sessions (Deep Tissue bodywork) working a specific region for pain & tightness on each client. Relaxed, but full schedule.
30 minutes hands on time 15 minutes before & after (intake, Q&A, undress/dress - Client. Not you.) 15 minutes between clients (change sheets, clean lotion/oil bottles and anything else you touched, breathe) ------------ 60 minutes each 10 hours to help 10 people (10 sets of dirty sheets)	15 minutes actual working time 10 minutes before & after (intake, Q&A, client takes shoes off, you put socks on -- on YOU, not the client.) 15 minutes between clients (wipe down mat, get socks out, breathe, eat something, follow-up on phone calls, go to the bathroom) ------------ 40 minutes each 6 hours and 40 minutes to help 10 people (10 sets of dirty socks)
1 set of dirty sheets average 3 lbs. 3 sets (9 lbs) fills a load in a large capacity washer & dryer, so we'll use that for our figures.	1 set of dirty socks average 2 oz. So... 72 pairs of socks = 1 load (9 lbs). Rossiter Coach can do their one load of laundry every 7th day. A couple extra pairs of socks won't overload the machines.
Massage Therapist goes home & washes 3 loads of laundry. Every 3rd day it's 4 loads because the 10th set won't fit in the wash with the others. Between working 10 hours on 10 people and coming home to do laundry, they're BEAT!	Rossiter Coach goes home, changes clothes and goes out dancing. They didn't have to expend as much energy on their clients, worked a shorter day helping the same number of people, and only filled 1/7th of a wash load.
Back to the laundry thing... Scenario 2
Let's say the Massage Therapist actually does 6 One Hour Deep Tissue Massages each day. (More realistic situation.) Allowing 30 minutes between table time (REALLY tight day) for the intakes, dressing/undressing, sheet changes and cleanup, they're working 9 hours and creating 2 loads of laundry each day.	Rossiter Coach wants to work 9 hours, too! Same timeframe as above because they don't want to rush. Same 10 min client time/15 minute working time + 15 min between means Rossiter Coach gets to help (and receive payment from) 13 people in 9 hours WITH an extra 20 minute break. That's 65 pairs of socks a week (13 x 5). It takes 72 pairs for a load, but since the Rossiter Coach had a break, they had time to dust the studio and can throw a couple hand towels in the wash to fill the load. So 1 load for the week.
Laundering 2 loads of sheets each day x 5 days = 10 loads a week from 30 clients. Each load contains 9 lbs of sheets. That's 90 lbs of sheets a week. Betcha thought I was going to ask you to solve some algebraic equation after all that. It gave me a flashback to high school math. Yikes!	Friday is wash day. Rossiter Coach puts 65 pairs of socks in the laundry, along with the dust cloth and hand towels. The only real downside is matching all those socks. So - one load for the week that weighs in at about 9 lbs.
What's that Carbon Footprint thing? The more CO2 you produce, the worse it is for the environment. The calculator I used showed results in lbs. That's a measurement of liquid CO2 at some atmospheric... level... thing... they kind of lost me there. The important thing to know is that BIG numbers are bad and small numbers are less worrisome. Here's the tool I used: http://laundryconsulting.com/resources/carbon-footprint-calculator/
The Massage Therapist's 90 lbs of sheet laundering each week produces a Carbon Footprint of 5 lbs a day, which translates to 1,927 lbs a year.	The Rossiter Coach, on the other hand, produces an amount daily that doesn't measure on the scale and 64 lbs annually. (And their studio is dusted and their towels are clean with no additional trauma to the environment - at least in this scenario.)
Apples and Apples - Compare and Contrast the Two
Longer sessions to provide client relief from pain and tightness. Often involves sharp, pointy objects like elbows and knuckles (that hurt!), though, not always. Work has to be eased layer by layer to get thru tightness - or focuses on very specific spots like trigger points. Deep Tissue Massage is hard work. It's REALLY hard work if you're doing LOTS of it, especially on people who think that Deep Tissue means you're supposed to make them hurt for days. (I hate those people.) You have to buy stuff like oils & lotions. Then you have to get them OUT of those sheets when you wash them. Sanitary sheets require HOT water. Bad for that Carbon Footprint. Yep. That laundry thing's a killer! Wash, dry, fold, lug them around. You might as well call it your exercise program, cause you don't have time to go to the gym! NOT friendly to the environment. It's those darn sheets. Carbon Footprint. Big and bad.	Short sessions. Rossiter involves pinning down tissue and talking the client through moving to lengthen and loosen ALL the layers in that area - moving in the natural range of motion to restore natural movement. Rossiter is pretty darn EASY on the Coach. It's deep work that works WITH the client. I often tell people that my job is to loiter and boss people around. I usually do it nicely, but I seldom have to break a sweat and the clients get some powerful work that gets rid of their pain and tightness quickly. No lotions, potions or other such stuff. Just socks. Ok. And wipes to clean your mat between people. In case THEY broke a sweat. Laundry is FUN in Rossiter. Except that sometimes I almost forget how to operate the washer and dryer. If you lose some socks, you can wear mismatched ones and just use sock colors instead of left and right for direction. They'll think you did it on purpose and you don't have to be responsible for remembering left and right correctly any more! Rossiter is SO friendly to the environment that we should get a special award! Footprint. From our foot. In a little sock. Powerful medicine.
Conclusion
Ok - the laundry produced by Massage Therapy is bad for the environment. Not Massage Therapy - the piles of dirty sheets. More laundry, more environmental impact (the bad kind), and it takes more sessions to achieve similar results, creating more dirty sheets.	The laundry produced by Rossiter Coaches is ridiculously minor. Less laundry, less environmental impact, more client satisfaction through faster, longer lasting results from each session. Just two little socks each time. Return clients won't kill the planet.
Rossiter Coaches just make footprints. Forget the carbon.

Written by a Licensed Massage Therapist and Rossiter Coach who provides Deep Tissue Work using both modalities. All commentary here represents the thoughts and opinions only of the author, based on her personal experience and is not an endorsement by or representative of the opinions of Rossiter & Associates, Inc, the parent company of The Rossiter System.

Massage Therapy is a wonderful thing. I highly recommend it for general relaxation and stress relief, and can't get enough of it personally. For Deep Tissue work I find Rossiter to be more effective for the client - and more friendly to both me, as the practitioner, and the environment. The Rossiter System work is not appropriate for all individuals. But when it is, it TOTALLY rocks! - Diane