Save Your Hands!: The Complete Guide to Injury Prevention and Ergonomics for Manual Therapists, Third Edition

Description

By Lauriann Greene & Richard Goggins
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9780967954929
374 pages

2025 Third Edition

Massage, bodywork, and other forms of manual therapy can be physically demanding. For students and working professionals alike, sore hands, aching backs, and neck or shoulder discomfort can become familiar consequences of a busy workday. Save Your Hands! was created to help practitioners understand these occupational risks and, more importantly, learn practical ways to prevent them.

For years, Save Your Hands! has helped manual therapists around the world protect their health and sustain their careers through proven principles of injury prevention, ergonomics, body mechanics, and self-care. The newly updated Third Edition offers the book’s most comprehensive and holistic approach yet.

Presented in an accessible, richly illustrated format, Save Your Hands! Third Edition includes:

• Current guidance for protecting your health and career, addressing both the physical demands of manual therapy and everyday activities such as computer and mobile phone use.
• Detailed body mechanics instruction designed to help practitioners work with less effort, strain, and discomfort.
• Comprehensive ergonomics guidance for arranging treatment spaces to support good body mechanics and greater comfort while working.
• Alternative techniques and approaches that can reduce stress on vulnerable areas of the body.
• A specially designed conditioning program to help practitioners build the strength and resilience needed for manual therapy work.
• Updated guidance on recognizing early symptoms and addressing them before they develop into injuries that may interfere with work and well-being.
• A new section on daily self-care, including practical ways to begin the workday relaxed and use restorative “mini-breaks” throughout the day to reduce fatigue and help prevent burnout.

The Third Edition continues to receive praise from leading figures in manual therapy. Sandy Fritz, MS, BCTMB, CMBE, author of Mosby’s Fundamentals of Therapeutic Massage, recommends the book for “students, educators, and seasoned professionals,” while David Palmer, widely known as the “father of chair massage,” has called Save Your Hands! “a major contribution to our profession.”

Used as required reading in schools and training programs, Save Your Hands! Third Edition provides practical tools for protecting the hands, back, neck, shoulders, and overall well-being—helping practitioners build healthier, more sustainable careers.

For students and professionals across the manual therapy professions, including massage therapists, physical therapists and physical therapist assistants, occupational therapists, hand therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, nurses, athletic trainers, and others whose work places significant physical demands on the body.