What is SLM Bodywork + How Can It Help You?

SLM is Steve Lockhart’s  Myotherapy, a hands on form of bodywork based largely on an ancient art of healing from the East. It was made popular by Steve Lockhart in the early 90s and is totally changing the way pain and injury is being treated.

SLM Bodywork uses a combination of massage and acupressure techniques that put the body into a balanced state so its own natural healing potential can work the way it was designed to.  

Combined with exercise, diet and supplements, where needed to make the body more treatable, the body work is used to remove the stress or pressure that has built up in areas causing the potential for irritation, inflammation and pain. 

How Is SLM Different?

SLM body work is different to other forms of massage, physiotherapy or body work, mainly because it treats the whole body each session and focuses very much on the cause or reason for a person's pain not just their symptoms. 

We treat the tissue with a variety of massage and acupressure techniques, balancing one part of the body with the others as we go. 

If you've had a SLM treatment before you will most likely have noticed that we don't stay on one area for too long.

The first reason for this is once a muscle or group of muscles have been worked for a short time it is important to leave it alone to recover and allow changes to occur in the tissue before coming back to it and continuing further. This stops a person from getting bruised or too sore the next day. 

Secondly, for every point of tension, spasm or blockage in the body there is a balancing point of tension, spasm or blockage elsewhere which needs to be released in conjunction with the first area. 

You will not get fully, lasting relief if the corresponding area isn't being worked on simultaneously.

This is why it is so important to work the body as a whole and not just the area where the pain and discomfort is being felt. 

Many times I have been able to relieve severe sciatica pain by working up around the shoulder blade area and hardly touching the sciatica area at all. 

SLM Bodywork is not just another style of massage- we use a unique form of massage to effect the changes to the physical body that we recognize are needed to help take away a pain or problem. 

Steve Lockhart is the founder of SLM- Steve Lockharts Myotherapy. 

He ruptured the cruciate ligament in his left knee playing football and underwent reconstructive surgery. However, he had limited success with rehabilitation and was fortunate enough to be sent to see an elderly gentleman of Tongan and German descent who performed a unique form of massage to his whole body. 

As he released the knots and spasms from the muscles in his leg and back (the original cause of Steve injuring his knee) and stimulated the weak and flaccid muscles that had developed, his whole body began to respond and the pain went away. 

Eventually dissatisfied with the work he was doing, Steve asked John if he would teach him what he knew which has now become the basis of SLM Bodywork. 

To say this type of bodywork is new would be misleading because it is based largely on a unique form of massage with Eastern origins that was practiced in relative obscurity for hundreds of years. John was originally taught by a Japanese man when he was a boy living in Tonga in the 1940's, who was taught by his grandfather and passed on down the family line. Steve Lockhart is the first person to share this information and techniques outside of their family line. 

What can SLM Body work Help With?

Pretty much any musculo-skeletal problem you may be experiencing from general muscle tightness and tension to sciatica, lower back pain, hip pain, shoulder and neck pain. I have found SLM Body work to be beneficial in about 90% of clients I have treated over the past 10+ years. Of course there are cases where the body has been left in such a state of tightness and imbalance that unfortunately only surgery has been able to help.

It doesn't matter what your lifestyle, everyone has occasions when their body is in pain or a state of dysfunction. SLM bodywork is a fast and effective way of returning the body to it's normal state whilst treating the cause of the problem so that it doesn't return.