Getting the massage across

RUNNING and walking, standing and sitting - whatever you do, your body is under pressure.

Exercise is good, everybody says so. If you don't exercise, your belly takes on a life of its own. Yet if you do exercise, your body still finds ways to punish you. Joints ache, muscles throb, knees creak, backs hurt. Sometimes all at once, as anyone who has managed the Great North Run can testify.

Lynn Byas knows all about aches and pains. She can put a finger on exactly where it hurts. But she doesn't just place a finger on a tender spot. She uses all her fingers and her whole hands to knead and manipulate muscles and tendons. And she teases out problems you didn't know were there, finding a knot of clenched muscle in, say, an apparently innocent calf, or discovering something not quite right in a muscle that twangs somewhere between your spine and your hip.

She does not do these seemingly unkind things because she likes hurting people. No, it's just part of her job as a remedial masseuse. If massage brings to mind gentle music, candles and caressing hands, a visit to Lynn might come as a muscle-pounding shock. For remedial massage is vigorous, hands-on therapy.

In her small reception room at Hamlynn Health in Fulford, Lynn describes what she does, with hints of what she is about to do to me. My body is to be donated to journalistic research, you see.

For the sake of this report, the previous two days have included one game of squash (a lamentable defeat) and a five-mile run. I share my aches with Lynn.

"That's because you've been doing things your body doesn't like," she says, briskly.

She is not warning me off exercise, she explains, just pointing out that pain is likely to indicate a problem.

Initially, I was drawn to Lynn by a fax which arrived with the alarming exclamation: "Exercise! Beware!" There followed a list of what can happen when exercise goes wrong, from muscle strains, tears and soreness, right through inflamed tendons to "stress, depression, disappointment and low self-esteem".

Great heavens, I thought all this was meant to be good for me.

Warming up is the key, as is its feverish sister, cooling down. Lynn is keen on both. Warming up, she suggests, should entail more than dashing from the car to the squash court, with only pause for a quick stretch of an inert muscle.

You should always warm up before attempting to stretch, Lynn advises: "The warm up should be long enough to produce a light sweat." And the cool down should involve movement, such as walking or jogging - or stretching while lying or sitting - but never standing.

Before Lynn gets to the laying on of hands, she tells me about remedial massage. "In this country we don't understand the importance of massage," she says. "It's a tremendous therapy. It's what physios used to do, years ago. If you talk to older people, they'll tell you that's what going to the physio used to be like."

The main difference lies in the hands, as I am about to discover.

Lynn Byas is a small woman but she has powerful hands. As you lie on a consultation couch, wearing only your underpants and a borrowed towel, she works you over, forcefully unleashing the stresses trapped in your body. At times the experience leans nicely towards the gentle. But mostly there is too much vigour for this to be described as in any way peaceful.

As Lynn massages your body, her hands will find a painful knot of muscle. She says she can feel a problem. It has to be said that you can too. At times the massage can be uncomfortable, even a little painful. But it never really hurts because Lynn can't work against the tension in your body. If you can't relax, she will move on and work elsewhere.

"This is like a work-out at the gym," she says at one point. Afterwards, my body aches in various places. My calf muscles, in particular, have been tricked into thinking they've just been on a long run. Yet the experience feels beneficial, in a hurting-and-working sort of way.

What Lynn does, as she pummels, pulls and pushes your soft tissues, is work out where complaints may be lurking. These problems may be known to you already. Some, a tender back or a weak knee perhaps, will be old friends. Yet Lynn finds other areas of treatment, uncovering in my case a slightly immobile hip, creaky ankles, lumpy calf muscles and a possible lower back problem with a link to the groin area.

Great heavens, I'm a physical wreck at 43. Not so, Lynn reassures me, we all have these problem areas. Identifying a complaint before it erupts can avert discomfort and pain.

Lynn Byas, who used to be a physiological measurement technician at York District Hospital, has been a remedial massage therapist for three years. She treats patients of various ages, uncovering posture or sporting problems, and helping to ease the pain of arthritis. All with her hands.

Lynn Byas, Hamlynn Health, 7 Fulford Park, Fulford, York. Phone: 01904 623840. An introductory consultation lasts about an hour and costs £25. Subsequent treatments cost £20 per session.