♪ Bob and Brad, ♪
the two most famous
physical therapists
on the Internet.
- Hi folks. I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Together, we are the most famous physical therapists
on the Internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Our humble opinion.
Today, we're going to talk about how to use a massage gun
on an arthritic joint.
Now, this is just kind of an overview
because we will probably do individual videos
on how to do massage on like, say, an arthritic knee,
which we already did,
arthritic shoulder, arthritic hip.
- Sure.
- But just a rule of thumb, number one,
we're not going to apply the massage directly to the joint.
The joint is, you know,
you can see here the hyaline cartilage.
I'll go ahead and circle this.
That pink area right in there.
You can see how it's starting to flake off
and it's starting to rub off and starting to wear out.
- Which is arthritis.
It's not going to do any good to massage that area.
- No, it might do it some harm, it might do it some harm.
- If you get too aggressive, it can be painful.
So what you're going to want to do instead is actually,
you're going to want to,
to hit the muscles above the knee and below the knee.
Thank you, Brad.
Let's go get this bigger.
- Nice work, Bob.
- This is a good example right here,
'cause we just did one on the knee.
So you're going to want to massage it,
and there's a lot of muscles we talk about,
but you're going to want a massage
the muscles upstream and downstream.
That's a statement by Kelly Starrett.
He's the author of "Becoming a Supple Leopard".
Great book.
- It just means above or below the joint.
- Yeah, up and below the joint.
You can see above the joint, we got the quadricep muscles
and below the joint, we have the hamstring muscles.
- Maybe we should make that a different color.
- Oh yeah, maybe we should.
Oh well.
- If I do that, I'll probably delete the whole page.
(laughs)
Oh, there you go.
- We got black anyway.
- Well done, nice work.
- Now below the joint, we also have the gastrocnemius.
- Right. So we're just talking these-
- It goes across the knee too,
which a lot of people don't know.
Your calf muscle actually goes across the knee.
So you're gonna want to massage those muscles,
especially if they're tight and painful,
because by loosening those up, making them more supple,
they're gonna put less stress on your knee,
your knee's going to work better,
it's going to get more motion and so forth.
So the question is now,
what might you use for the head
of the massage gun you're going to use?
- Yeah, right here we've got a plethora, you know.
Each gun gets four or five heads,
but usually it's not too hard to figure out.
If it's real sore, you might use the air head
or if you're close to the-
- Close to the bone, yes.
- Close to the bone.
- So if you're down on the end of the quadricep,
let's say you're trying to hit right above the knee,
you're going to probably want to use the air head
because you're going to hit right on,
you might bump into the top of the knee cap sometime.
- Yep. And these pull off and on very easily.
This is very nice.
So that's the one I would be using if I...
And you know, Bob, you had this issue with-
- Yes, I did have that issue.
- Your quadricep- - Quadricep tendonitis.
- Tendonitis, where you--
- And I also think now it might've been
my super patellar pouch, believe it or not.
- Whoa, the poach. Again.
- Yeah, there's a pouch right there,
and I can get it here down.
And I had 80% relief.
I had pain right above the knee and I had 80% relief
with just doing a few treatments of massage gun.
- And this is the head you used? Or did you use-
- I was able to get by with the round head too,
just kind of sideways.
- Yeah. The old round head.
I kind of like the name of that though, round head.
I'm not a round head, you are.
All right, here we go. So yes.
So now the round heads, it's kind of firm.
It's not real soft,
but see you may have to go sideways with it.
- Sideways, right. That works out really well.
- Yep. 'Cause the fibers go up and down,
we're going to go cross ways.
- Now, if you're hitting, you know,
the tendon right below the kneecap,
the patella tendon, same thing,
that would work really well for that
'cause you could go across the-
- Sure. Ooh, Yeah.
This one, there's a lot of bone on there
so you're probably not going to do this at all.
It's just going to be sideways.
I mean, this is our smaller one.
There's an air head on here, you can see how it bounces.
- Yeah, it bounces around.
- Yeah, you don't want to do that.
- So you can, you know what, the larger the muscle,
quads are a fairly large muscle,
you can get aggressive with those.
You could even use the pointer on that, Brad, couldn't you?
Or-
- Yeah, it really does...
If you're a big beefy type of person-
- Yeah, here's a big, powerful gun, and you could hit that
with the metal head.
- Right, and get after it.
And that's the biggest gun,
that's typically for a larger, athletic type of person.
- Do you want to pull up the handheld massager too, Brad?
- Oh yeah. Well, we've got massagers all over.
- You're leaving massage guns on.
This is a smaller gun,
and despite being small,
it's got really good leverage with it.
And also it's very powerful.
This is the one I use at home, actually, believe it or not.
- Yep. I believe you, Bob.
- I use it to massage my calves every morning and...
- Yeah. This one is really nice for thinner people
or older people for sure.
And the price is good on it too.
You got a handle so you can get, for example,
if you're going to go the hamstrings, which we're gonna,
are we gonna to talk about the hamstrings, Bob?
- Yeah, go ahead, talk about the hamstrings, Brad.
So here, I'm going to get on the hamstring
and I'm going to keep my knee bent
so the muscle is lax a little bit.
It's not pulled tight, which is a good way to massage.
That one, for me, it's just not strong enough.
I've got to get in with the gun itself,
and then I can bear down on it
and really get into that hamstring.
Whoa.
Now, I'm actually dealing with a really mild hamstring.
It's not even a strain,
but I can tell it's talking to me a little bit
when I do some things.
So I will massage in there with a gun.
And the beauty of both these guns, a really fun thing is,
they feel good.
It's just, it's an enjoyable, relaxing experience.
- It's not no pain, no gain treatment.
So here's the shoulder,
if we want to see what an arthritic shoulder looks like too.
Same thing, the cartilage is eroding there.
You know, the smooth cartilage on the ball of the humerus,
and as it starts to wear out, it becomes rough.
And that's where you hear that clicking noise
and it does, it grinds.
- I think of it as kind of like, the joint is getting rusty.
You know? Aging process, overuse,
things just are not what they used to be.
- It's a good analogy.
But the same thing on this,
and we did a whole video on this, you can check it out,
just on massaging for the shoulder.
Most of the muscles that affect the shoulder
are not right on the joint itself, they're rounded.
- Yeah, right here.
- You can go above it again, like in the upper trapezius,
you can go below it and you know, even in back of it too,
where you're hitting on the shoulder blade.
And you can see that right here.
This person's oriented like this
and supraspinatus, infraspinatus.
- And that would be right about in here on those muscles.
- Yeah. So that's just kind of the rule of thumb.
You got to play around with it. Yeah.
This handheld massager, what's nice about that
is you can reach some spots.
Not as powerful, but you can reach
most of the spots of the body,
as opposed to these where you might need
a little help from a friend-
- Right.
- Or a spouse,
or a loved one or a family member.
- Whatever, Bob. (laughing)
- So this video's part of a series of videos
on using the massage gun for healing problems
around the body.
- That's right. So what you do is go to bobandbrad.com.
You're going to look to the programs section, click on that.
That brings up a number of programs:
sciatica, tens unit, plantar fasciitis--
- Shoulder.
- And massage gun, shoulder.
So then hit massage gun, go to the title of,
there will be like 20, 30 videos.
Look at the titles,
you'll know which one you want to look at.
Click on it, watch it, and then click on the PDF printout,
print out a page of the review instructions
from the whole video.
And there's no cost, not even an email.
It's a wonderful deal.
Take advantage of it, and we'll be happy you did.
- It's our gift to you.
- That's right. Woo.
- Remember that game show where they would all blow a kiss?
- No.
- All right. Thanks for watching.
(upbeat music)