Amy's muscling in on pain (From The Northern Echo)

Amy's muscling in on pain

6:01am Friday 5th January 2007 in Health Features

As a sports masseuse, Amy Woolstenhomes relieves all kinds of aches and pains, including those of professional athletes. She talks to Women's Editor Sarah Foster about her widely varied job and how she's helping to set the standard in her field.

FOR someone who works with burly 6ft sportsmen, Amy Woolstenholmes is surprisingly petite. She shakes my hand - her grip is firm but hardly vice-like - and leads me down the corridor to a classroom. A chart with diagrams showing body parts stands beside a treatment bed. These are the tools of Amy's trade.

For around three years, she's been in practice as a qualified sports masseuse. This means she specialises in soft tissue - muscles, ligaments and tendons - as distinct from physiotherapy, which covers other things as well. As northern regional representative of the Sports Massage Association, or SMA, she plays a vital role, providing support for other members and being present at key events like the Great North Run.

"I used to live near Peterborough, and there were two areas of my life," says the 28-year-old, who's now in South Shields. "I had my sport - I'm still a hockey player and I love everything about sport - and I was also working with the visually impaired for a charity called Sense, where massage was quite a key thing. I really enjoyed sport and I really enjoyed doing massage, so I spoke to Beth Webster, who's a lecturer for the Sports Performance Services, and she got me involved in sports massage."

Amy went to Cardiff - a specialist centre - to do her training. "I wanted to make sure it was recognised by someone, so that's how I found out about the SMA," she says. "The course enabled me to become a member."

Though only formed in 2002, the organisation claims to set the standard in sports massage. Before its inception, there was no real regulation and even now, there are no laws to govern practitioners.

As Amy explains, a key concern is inspiring confidence. "A practitioner called Joan Watt realised that physiotherapists cover such a range of skills that it would be useful to have people who were properly qualified to provide the soft tissue manipulation that goes along with physiotherapy," she says.

Having qualified and joined the group, Amy moved to the North-East. "I was just a bit bored," she says. "I'd travelled a lot previously so I did my course and just thought 'I don't really want to stay at home - I'll run away to the North-East where I've got lots of friends and try to set up a business'."

She now divides her time between giving massages and teaching students. "I'm contracted to the City of Sunderland College for half my time," says Amy. "I'm a curriculum support officer for travel and tourism and sport and exercise courses, which basically means I'm an assistant lecturer. I'm studying for my PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) as well, so I can become a qualified lecturer."

Amy is clearly in demand as a masseuse. She has a varied client base which isn't just confined to sport. "I split it into four categories," she says. "I've got elite, social, conditional or occupational. Northern practitioners cover quite a lot of elite athletes - I work with Durham County Cricket Club and also with the English Institute of Sport over in Gateshead, so I cover a massive range of elite athletes. My social category is people who play sport socially, and occupational is people who just get totally stressed out at work. Then there's conditional - people who might have ongoing conditions. One of my clients suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and I've also got someone who had breast cancer and gets really tight on one particular side of her shoulders, so she gets treated on a regular basis."

Modern lifestyles and ways of working result in many aches and pains, and Amy often finds she's called to sort these out. She's not surprised to see the problems that she does. "People obviously get tight in their necks and shoulders from simple movements that the body is not used to," she says. "When they were working down the mines they would have had real physical exertion but now people aren't physically exerted - they just sit in one position all day - so the muscles are working differently. Instead of always contracting and relaxing, they're always in a contracted state, so it's a lot harder for them to relax at the end of the day."

One thing Amy never does is take a risk - if she's not sure, she'll leave the problem well alone. Her job depends on knowing her limits. "Sports massage practitioners know what they can and can't deal with," she says. "I know that I'm good at what I do and I know my boundaries. With the elite athletes, if there's something I'm not sure of I can go to their physiotherapist." She adds half-jokingly: "I've got insurance for £5m. If you use an SMA practitioner, it's guaranteed that they're insured."

Such is her belief in the organisation that when it asked for representatives, she was only too happy to volunteer. Now as well as doing her day jobs, she helps promote it, though rarely with pay. So why would anyone work for free? "To be a member of the SMA gives your customers reassurance that you have hit certain standards and that you're good enough," she says. "I took on the role of regional representative just so that I could meet other people and get involved. I think it's important to raise awareness of the Sports Massage Association because it obviously benefits me in the long run if people only use its practitioners."

While she seems happy in her work, I wonder if Amy, given half a chance, would rather be out there on the field. She starts to laugh. "I'd love to," she says. "If I could have excelled in a sport, that would have been great. I used to be a gymnast when I was little so I would have liked to have done that. Sometimes I'll be treating an athlete who's 22 and getting close to the top of their game and you think 'that's not fair. How can you be so talented?' - but it's great to be involved in the environment."

At least she has her compensations. She gets to work with world-class athletes - when asked to name-drop, she cites the cricketers Steve Harmison and Paul Collingwood - and even ordinary people really value what she does.

"It's rare that I'll get someone who feels worse or who feels there hasn't been an impact," says Amy. "A lot of my clients are now friends because I see them so regularly. They look forward to me going. It's lovely."

* For a full list of Sports Massage Association accredited practitioners, ring 020-8545-0861 or visit www.thesma.org