Week 3 • All Bones About It!
- Hands on Healing
- Oct 2
- 2 min read
My Dear Friend,
It's the beginning of October and I can't think of a better time to tell you all about BONES! This week in massage school, we took a deep dive into the skeletal system. ☠
Ok first off, did you know bones are ORGANS?! I think most people, myself included, tend to regard bones as sort of solid, unchanging, almost dead things. But no. They are very much alive. Bones are made of living cells. Osteoblasts are bone builders and osteoclasts are bone destroyers. (How metal is that? 🤘)
Remodeling
You see our skeletons change over time, based on how we use them. Your body will build structure where it's asked for and will destroy structure if it's not being used. This is called remodeling, a fascinating, slow-mo process that is in direct relationship with our daily habits, postures, and movement patterns. For example, most babies are born with kneecaps made of soft cartilage that harden into bone over several years after they've transitioned from crawling to walking.
So our skeletal system gives us shape, protects our delicate organ systems, and gives our muscles points of contact so we can pull on them like levers to create motion. The study of these movement relationships is called Kinesiology and we will get much more into that later. I feel like the relationship between massage and the movements of the musculoskeletal system are somewhat obvious.
But if we zoom all the way into the cellular level, we learn about two other really important functions. Our bones act as reserve storage for minerals and nutrients, as well as the site of Hematopoesis: the making of new blood cells. Here's what's wild: because massage improves overall circulation, bones then receive more nutrients for storage, and can increase blood cell production. These cellular level benefits of massage keep blowing my mind...
Ok. I know that's a lot of science. I hope my nerdy enthusiasm makes it somewhat interesting for you. Please know that during class, it took everything I had to not break into that one song from I Think You Should Leave. 🤓
Happy October, my friend! More spooktacular body horror to come...
