About thirty-odd years ago, when I was training as a massage therapist, I needed bodies to practise on. I asked a few friends first. Some of them said yes, but not many of them committed to it. It's easy to say yes. Actually making the time is another thing, and I needed people who would keep turning up.
So I put an ad in one of the local papers. I can't remember the exact wording now, it's that long ago, but it was something along the lines of “Bodies wanted for massage student”. I paid for a couple of lines in the small ads and waited for the phone to ring.
It did ring, a few times, and some people came. One of the people who rang was a man called Ronald.
We chatted on the phone for a while. He wanted to know what I was studying and how far into the course I was, and his questions were better than the ones I'd been asking myself. I liked him straight away. He came round a few days later and we got on really well from the first afternoon.
Ronald wasn't your usual volunteer. He was a very clever chap, a real scholar, and he'd written books. He also spoke fluent Latin, which I'd never come across in anyone before and haven't since. He didn't do massage for a living, but he was quite a way into it himself. He'd had a lot of massages over the years and read a lot about it. He knew his anatomy better than I did at the time.
Your turn
That first visit I gave him a full massage, the way I'd been taught. When I'd finished he lay there for a minute, then sat up and said, “Right. Your turn.”
I wasn't expecting that at all. But I got on the table and he massaged me, and he was good. Not trained, but good. He had a feel for it.
Afterwards we sat and talked about both massages. Not just being polite, either. He told me exactly what he'd liked and what he hadn't, and then he asked me the same. That conversation went on longer than the massages did.
Taking it apart
We'd take a single move and do it over and over. One of us would do it and the other would say how it felt. Where it was nice and where it wasn't, where the pressure needed to be more or less, and whether it tickled. You'd be surprised how many places tickle on some people and not on others, mostly the backs of the knees and the sides of the ribs.
Then we'd try the same move a bit slower, or with the flat of the hand instead of the thumbs, and talk about it again. Ronald kept notes in a notebook. I never saw him without it.
If I rushed, he'd stop me and say, “Festina lente.” It's Latin for “make haste slowly”. He said it so often that I started hearing it in my head when he wasn't there, and I still do sometimes now when I catch myself going too fast.
It was a wonderful way to learn. On a course you practise on the other students, and everyone is being kind to each other. Ronald wasn't unkind, but he was honest. If something didn't work he'd tell me why, and he could put it into words, which most people can't. Most people will tell you a massage was lovely. Ronald would tell you the second stroke on the left side was lovely and the third one lost him.
That's how it went for the next few years, and it didn't stop when I qualified and started working. By then we'd become friends, so we carried on seeing each other and swapping massages and experiences, long after I had any need for someone to practise on.
Ronald knew quite a few people in the massage world, and over those years I met a lot of them through him. Everyone had their own way of working, and it was an interesting time, meeting other people and swapping ideas about how to massage. It was Ronald who introduced me to tantra, many years ago now. He showed me a book on tantric massage at the time, and that was my first proper look at it. Tantra was starting to come into massage circles by then. Tantra itself has been around for thousands of years.
When Ronald showed me the book, I realised at the time that it wasn't authentic tantra. It was more to do with erotic massage, presented as neo-tantra, the modern version that came out of the sixties with the hippies and flower power. We talked about it and he agreed. Some of the people we met then had gone their own way with it, each interpreting it as they saw fit. Everyone seemed to have their own version, but that's the way of the world.
The bit that gets skipped
One evening we got talking about the parts of the body that get missed. We came to the same answer pretty quickly. The bottom.
I've written before about my first nude massage, with Mr Knight, and how tender my glutes felt when he worked on them, because nobody had ever worked on them properly before. That's still true for a lot of people who come to me now. Most massages skim over the glutes or skip them altogether. A towel goes over the top and the therapist works around it. People are shy about it, and I believe plenty of therapists are shy about it too.
That's a shame, because they do a lot of work. Every time you take a step or get up out of a chair, your glutes are working. When they're tight they can pull on your lower back and hips, and you can feel it all the way down the leg. The pain that sent me to Mr Knight in the first place was in my left bum cheek.
There are three gluteal muscles on each side, and Ronald loved that their names are Latin.
Gluteus maximus is the big one, and the one you sit on. It's the largest muscle in the body, and it's what straightens your hip when you stand up or climb the stairs.
Gluteus medius sits higher up and out to the side, partly underneath the maximus. When you stand on one leg, it's what stops your pelvis dropping on the other side, so it's working every time you walk.
Gluteus minimus is the smallest. It's tucked in underneath the medius and helps it do its job.
The names are plain Latin. Maximus is the biggest, medius is the middle one and minimus is the smallest. Ronald liked that. He said the Romans weren't trying to be clever, they were just being clear. The word gluteus itself is older still. It comes from the Greek word gloutos, which simply means the buttock, so the Romans borrowed it from the Greeks and the anatomists borrowed it from the Romans. Anyone who says they've been working on their glutes is speaking a little bit of ancient Greek without knowing it.
The Gluteal Treat
Somewhere in all this talking, we decided to make a video. A proper one, all about massaging the glutes from start to finish.
Ronald wanted to give it a Latin title. I told him nobody would buy a video they couldn't pronounce. We settled on The Gluteal Treat, which made us both laugh, and it stuck.
We spent months on it. We wrote the whole routine out step by step in Ronald's notebook. It started with long, slow strokes to warm everything up, then went deeper with the palms and the thumbs, along the top edge of the pelvis where a lot of people hold tension. There was a section with the person lying on their side, because that's the best way to get at the medius. The knuckle move I'd learnt from Mr Knight went in too. We'd practise it on each other and change it, then practise it again.
We knew it couldn't just be the two of us on the table, though. Bottoms come in all shapes and sizes, and a routine that works on one person needs adapting for the next. So we asked other massage therapists, some I knew and a lot more that Ronald knew, and I asked some friends too. Not everyone was able to, but we had a handful who were keen to take part in our little venture.
We'd borrowed a camcorder and worked out the lighting in the room, and we had a list of who was coming on which day. We were nearly there.
It never happened
Then Ronald became unwell.
At first we just put the filming back a few weeks. Then it got put back again. He wasn't well enough to carry on, and in the end the video never happened. It's a great shame. All that work, Ronald's notebook full of it, and we never got any of it onto tape.
Sadly, Ronald didn't recover. He was a great guy. He taught me as much as any course did. Every time I spend time on someone's glutes, some of that is down to him.
Still on my mind
Over the years I've always wanted to do something along those lines. Not necessarily a video the way we planned it back then, but something that shows people how much difference it makes when the glutes get proper attention. The glutes are included in my massage routine, unless the client wants otherwise.
So this is where you come in. Some of you reading this might have ideas about how it could be done, and some of you might like the idea of taking part in something like that. If any of that sounds like something you'd like to be part of, please WhatsApp me.
I'd like to finish what Ronald and I started. I think he would have liked that too. Festina lente, though. Ronald would want it done properly.