Today we’re going to talk briefly about the table height.

It’s important that, depending on the modality that you are doing, your table height is appropriate for that as well as the thickness of your client. Sometimes your table height is not always the same height depending on how thick or how thin your client might be. But on the average, you want your table height at the foot of the table to be about fist length or the palm of your hand. Some therapists like it to be fist length and some like it to be where the hand is when it’s flat out.

I always have the foot of my table one notch lower than I have the head of the table. And the reason I do that is so that it helps with the little bit of drainage in the ethmoid when the client is laying face down. It helps with that sinus pressure. It’s not a complete answer but it certainly does benefit the client not to be flat. If they’re just elevated a little at the head they have less congestion when you roll them over or sit them back up.

Again, remember that you are going to, with a stone treatment, you’re going to do a lot of lunging and gliding. There’s going to be a lot of lunging and moving forward with your stones. Much more so than when you’re doing Swedish massage. So you need that table height in such a way according to the client’s thickness is that you can get leverage in to that lunge. So the pressure of the stone is adequate not to burn your client. It’s all about depth of pressure with the hot stone and movement with the hot stone. You must be able to have that upper body strength in that leverage going in to your client when you are using those hot stones or the bare skin.

Please be aware of that before you get your client on the table so you don’t have to adjust afterwards. Experiment.