Davis Community Massage and Body Therapy

05/26/2026

it appears the position of the arms/shoulder and engagement of those muscle groups is engaging fascia "springs" (like the Achilles tendon) that evolved to assist quadrupeds and are latent in humans. cool!

05/22/2026

crazy as this is... that might actually be helpful!

I fell down and fu**ed up my knee yesterday, where's my tail 😭

05/18/2026

Your muscle rebuilds in about three months. Your tendons and cartilage take roughly a year and a half. Your bone, up to two years. Adding 40 grams of whey daily for two weeks doesn't change any of those timelines.

That's the finding from a study published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The team measured rebuild rates across more than a dozen knee tissues in living older adults using a safe heavy-water tracer. Tissues sampled during routine knee replacement surgery. Half the participants kept their habitual diet. Half added 40 grams of whey daily for 14 days. At the end, the rebuild rates of every tissue were the same in both groups.

The hierarchy was dramatic.
Muscle rebuilt at about 1.2 percent per day. At that rate, your quadriceps theoretically turn over in roughly three months. Synovium, the membrane that lines the joint capsule, rebuilt at 0.8 percent per day. The fat pad behind your kneecap, about 0.5 percent. The cruciate ligaments deep in the knee, about 0.45 percent. The patellar tendon, the femoral cartilage, and the menisci all rebuilt at 0.18 to 0.21 percent per day, putting their full-pool turnover at roughly 1.3 to 1.5 years. Bone rebuilt at 0.12 to 0.21 percent per day across five sites, with the slowest taking up to 2.3 years for a complete cycle.

What this does and does not say.
It does not say protein doesn't build connective tissue. It does. Every tissue in your body depends on dietary amino acids as substrate, and the synthesis rates measured here confirm that all of these tissues are actively turning over. Bone is a living tissue that constantly remodels. Cartilage maintains itself, slowly. Tendons repair from training and from daily mechanical load, slowly.
What the study shows is that for these older adults on their normal diets, adding 40 grams of whey on top for two weeks did not accelerate the rebuild rate of any tissue measured. It is one trial. It is small and short. It cannot rule out effects in people with inadequate baseline intake, or effects that might appear with longer supplementation. What it does establish is that connective tissue synthesis rates are dramatically slower than muscle, and a two-week protein bump does not compress those rates.

That has direct implications for what protein supplementation is and isn't doing.
Protein supplementation is a tool for closing intake gaps and for hitting the per-meal threshold that maximizes muscle protein synthesis after training. It's effective at those goals. People who are not eating enough total protein, or who are not getting enough per meal to drive muscle protein synthesis in older muscle that has lost some sensitivity to amino acids, benefit from supplementation. That's well established and not in dispute.

Protein supplementation is not a connective tissue repair accelerator. Cartilage damage from running mileage, tendon overuse injuries, bone density loss in postmenopausal women, ACL rehabilitation timelines: none of these can be hurried with whey. The biology runs at its own clock speed regardless of how much you put in.

What this means in practice.
For training and recovery, the protein protocol that has actually been shown to work is unchanged. Roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, spread across three or four meals, each meal hitting at least 0.4 grams per kilogram. Training stimulus and adequate sleep do the heavy lifting on muscle adaptation. Supplemental protein at the meal level helps people hit those thresholds, especially for older adults, vegetarians, and anyone with a small appetite.

For connective tissue, the levers are different. Mechanical load through progressive training is the dominant signal for tendon and ligament adaptation. Resistance training drives bone density gains. Cartilage health responds to weight management and joint loading more than to nutrition. Collagen and vitamin C combined before training has interesting data for tendon collagen synthesis, but the effect sizes are modest. None of these tissues respond meaningfully to a protein bolus in a two-week window the way muscle does after a single training session.

The bigger reframe.
We have been treating tissue protein synthesis like a single dial. The reality is that your body runs many tissue clocks at very different speeds. Muscle is the fast one. Most of what we call "tissue building" outside of muscle takes 1 to 2 years per cycle, not days. When you injure a tendon at 55, the rehab timeline is set by how fast that tendon can lay down new collagen. Mechanical load and time do the work. Adequate protein supports it but doesn't compress the timeline.

Muscle responds to protein on a short timescale. Everything else responds on a long one. The two are not interchangeable.

Houtvast et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2026
Moore et al., J Gerontol A, 2015
Morton et al., Br J Sports Med, 2018
Bauer et al., J Am Med Dir Assoc, 2013
Shaw et al., Am J Clin Nutr, 2017

05/16/2026

I believe that massage needs to consider what a professional degree, similar to acupuncture or chiropractic, looks like. even if it is just a voluntary pathway, like say nursing master's degrees. having graduate level education means we have the minimum mechanics to publish research using the theory of the body that is typical in massage -- a holistic and systemic and interdependent understanding. when massage research requires being educated in another healing arts, that means publications are written from the theory of the body that is used within that profession. there are just some observations that we have about bodies and minds that cannot be understood outside of our own frameworks. this also means that the leaders in the industry have some credibility to gain access, institutional leverage, and resources to build organizations that can fight for what our profession is.

when i realized there was no higher education research in massage path for me, i pursued a masters in development, focusing on organizational and institutional design. I spent 8 years studying how other health professions professionalized and what did and did not work. I do teach some of it at my local massage school now and I have learned some lessons helping my school build professional infrastructure, but at base, I still think that it is a necessary precondition to the professionalization of our field.

however, professionalization is not exactly the path we may want either if the goal is integrating into allopathic medicine. my specialization as a massage therapist is integrative healthcare and a lot of my phd work was focused on the upstream factors of stress and the community development and economic development changes required to implement the social determinants of health as a poverty standard. allopathic medicine is a lot less effective as a theory of the body than the industry and the American Medical Association would like people to believe. one of my local universities is currently moving the health administration program out of the public health department and into the business administration department. i strongly believe that an allopathic-naturopathic hybrid as the hegemonic basis of our healthcare system is more viable long term for western society generally and American health specifically. and professionalization of the massage field in that kind of healthcare system looks a lot different than professionalization and integration into allopathic medicine systems.

05/16/2026

eleven months is very chronically ill core 😩😩😩

05/16/2026

Humans were never meant to live this physically disconnected from each other. For most of human history, people experienced daily affection, closeness, reassurance, co-regulation, eye contact, physical comfort, and human warmth without even thinking about it. The nervous system evolved around proximity to other people.

Now millions of people go months, years, sometimes even decades without enough safe touch, tenderness, affection, or emotional closeness... while being told this level of isolation is normal, independent, or even healthy. And the body keeps score whether people consciously realize it or not.

Chronic stress.
Emotional numbing.
Hypervigilance.
Loneliness.
Depression.
Difficulty relaxing.
Feeling emotionally "shut down."
A nervous system that slowly stops expecting comfort from other human beings at all.

One of the cruelest parts is that many do not fully realize how deprived they've become until a small moment of genuine tenderness almost breaks them emotionally. –
*
*
If you’re a survivor of CPTSD and this resonates with you, consider joining our trauma-informed community of co-survivors healing together.

Our Daily Recovery calls support survivors who are learning to manage their trauma responses, regulate their nervous system, and restore a felt sense of safety in their body through gentle co-regulation, shared support, and guidance rooted in trauma-informed care.

To learn more, visit https://cptsdfoundation.org/dailyrecoverysupport/ or follow the link on our bio and click on “Daily Recovery Support”

05/14/2026

🧠 Trauma can feel deeply physical, but that does not mean it is stored in body tissues waiting to be released.

From a prediction led view, the nervous system may predict threat, prepare the body to protect, then interpret returning body signals through that prediction. Touch, movement, safety and context may help the system update, not by releasing trauma from fascia or muscle, but by offering safer sensory information.

👐 Better explanations support safer, clearer and more evidence informed practice.

02/02/2026

body based safety is often the key to trauma recovery.