Blog Articles

Body Charge massages the Stanley Cup?

Yes, we can’t believe it either, but Body Charge sent 5 therapists to Santa Monica on Saturday night (june 16) for the

Stanley Cup Party.

And I’m not blowing our horn, but it’s good to let people know some of the places we have worked.  Trisha you can see, is an LA Kings fan, and she is in hog heaven……the therapists massaged the Kings and their guests, and then sat down to a dinner catered by Wolfgang Puck.   As owner of this company, I should have brought my massage chair.  O well….

Just the latest news in a day in a life of a chair massage company.

Trisha, a Body Charge therapist, next to the Stanley Cup at the party Saturday the 16th of June

Offices in New York and LA

14297238_s Body Charge is headquartered in Los Angeles and has a satellite location in New York City.  Our main areas of service are Los Angeles and New York where therapists are screened, interviewed and are required to give a hands on demo of their skills.  A thorough reference check is given as well, because we hire the best available in the city.

 

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Body Charge’s main offices are Los Angeles and New York.  Paul Guditis, Body Charge owner: ” Spreading ourselves too thinly over the US sometimes gets us in trouble.  In staffing small markets, there really is no chance of interviewing all of the therapists.  It is just totally unrealistic.  That is why our main focus will be the major markets in New York and Los Angeles.”

“I have a chance to go out and personally interview therapists, get a hands on demo, and find the best therapists available who want to do this work.  It’s amazing what people put down on paper, and what their massages are like.  Sometimes they are two different worlds.

” We can be called for anything, anywhere, anytime.  My job is to make sure it happens, with the best therapists available for the work.  I consider us one of the best out there.  And through the years, I’ve had a chance to see what is out there.  Seeing an employee get out of a massage chair with a smile and a healthy glow, well, there’s not a whole lot more that can make me happier.”

 

 

We provide Chair Massage AND Reflexology at your health fairs!

 

Massage chair and a LaFuma Reflexology Lounger-Our standard equipment

 

 

 

 

 

Body Charge can provide reflexology and foot massage at your health fairs, trade shows and employee appreciation days. It is a great addition to the standard chair massages we offer.  Your guests and employees have a chance to get off their feet and be pampered with a great foot treatment by an experienced reflexologist and accupressurist who addresses specific health issues through the feet and accupressure points.

 

It’s another way of showing your employees that you care!


5 Surprising Benefits of Chair Massage

Relaxing Corporate Body Chair MassageMassage not only feels good, but it also good for you.  Here are a few benefits:

1.  Massage reduces stress. Why?  Massage creates chemical changes within the body that reduce pain and stress.  One of the culprits is substance P.  Substance P is a neuro-peptide that transmits signals of pain and anxiety to the brain.  Studies show that massage twice a week showed a reduction of substance P in the patients saliva, and reduced pain.

2.  Massage strengthens your immunity.   Under stress your body produces cortisol, which in turn kills off important cells for your immune system.  Massage circulates white blood cells through out the body, and reduces the cortisol production.

3. Massage lowers blood pressure.

4.  Techniques:  There is no evidence supporting one massage technique over another.  As long as the pressure is enough to make a temporary indentation, it’s doing the job.

5.  Self massage.  Targeting the tendons in the forearm by stretching them can relieve pain and discomfort from long hours on the computer.  Also stretching those tendons by doing active stretches will also help with those computer muscles…..

Chicago Corporate Massages

 

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Beautiful evening view of the Chicago Loop

We want to continue to inform our potential clients that we are very active in Chicago as a home for corporate massage therapy.  Law firms in the Loop, as well as internet firms on Wacker Drive, use us consistently as employee perks.   Being a Chicago native, I understand how stressful working downtown can be.  Many people have to commute by trains into the Loop, and more often than not, in challenging weather conditions.  So consider doing office chair massages for your employees.  They’ll love you for it, and maybe even buy you a hot dog, from Hot Dougs….one of the best places in town!

Massage for Neck Surgery

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Medical MRI magnetic resonance image of cervical spine with disc herniation and spinal cord compression

As the owner of Body Charge, I have studied many different types of massage, and seen many different types of injuries.

I am currently recovering from neck surgery for a bulging disc between c5 and c6.  The procedure was called a ACDF- an anterior cervical discetomy where the surgeon makes an incision in the front of your neck off to the side, to get to the disc.  He then replaces the disc with a piece of special plastic that dissolves as the bones start to heal and graft.

During this time I have had to wear a cervical collar, and now it is my 6th week…  physical therapy including EMS and ice have helped a lot.  Massage for traps, scalene muscles, and occipital muscles have helped relieve the tension caused by having to keep my neck so rigidly straight.

Massage can help the healing process speed along and help your recovery during post-op.

Regards,

Paul-CEO

Road Rage

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Do you feel ‘righteous rage’ on the road?

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
July 20, 2010 8:56 a.m. EDT
Close your eyes and think of something calming if anger is flaring up, experts say.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • A person’s upbringing may reflect how he or she will handle anger in adulthood
  • “Righteous rage” is when people feel entitled to something and get angry when they don’t get it
  • Anger isn’t just bad for your relationships; it can also affect your health

(CNN) — You’re speeding along on the highway and someone cuts you off out of nowhere. Your heart starts racing, and you pound your wrists on the horn, screaming obscenities only you can hear.

It’s one of those moments when you’re so angry that you act out of character, transforming from mild-mannered to vengeful person. It’s as if something in your brain tells you that you need to fight back.

Instances of frustration are common in daily life, but sometimes it can get out of control.

Four audio recordings capturing a heated argument, allegedly between actor Mel Gibson and his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, have been released since July 9 by RadarOnline. In the most recently revealed recording, a man threatens to burn down the house. CNN has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the recordings.

Grigorieva and Gibson were scheduled to appear in court Tuesday for a status hearing on a restraining order that Grigorieva filed against him, alleging that he struck her in the face, according to her spokesman, Stephen Jaffe.

Gibson isn’t the only one in the news lately who’s allegedly been having anger issues. Carlos Zambrano, pitcher for the Chicago, Illinois, Cubs, has been on the restricted list since June, when he had a shout-out with teammate Derrek Lee. Zambrano has finished anger management therapy and participated Thursday in his first bullpen session since the confrontation, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Holding a grudge really impacts your relationship, and it’s empowering another person to control you.
–Robert Goldman, attorney and psychologist

Anger stems from a survival instinct, experts say. When you feel that someone is threatening your existence, you fight back to save yourself.

A calm, rational person may appear to transform into an angry beast in a traffic jam because of that need to protect oneself, said Dr. Tracy Latz, psychiatrist in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“It gets into this mentality of ‘kill or be killed,’ ” Latz said. “Subsconsciously, there’s a fear that someone else is going to kill or take power over me.”

Combine that with a sense of entitlement and you’ve got what attorney and clinical psychologist Robert Goldman calls “righteous rage.” That’s when people feel so strongly they deserve something that it blinds them to the reality of the situation, and they behave irrationally.

“While we live in a world of abundance in our country, it can also create feelings of anger and rage when we get caught up in it. We’re not able to step back and see how really lucky and blessed we are,” said Goldman, who works for the probation department of Suffolk County, New York.

In making decisions, the frontal lobe of the human brain, which is relatively new in evolutionary history, is instrumental. But the more primitive parts of the brain are involved in anger, Goldman said. Alcohol can inhibit the more thoughtful functioning and allow anger to flood out.

People tend to lash out at family members because they believe those close to them will not abandon them, no matter what, Latz said. A family setting is when people often let their guard down, which can lead to ugly confrontations.

A person’s upbringing may reflect how he or she will handle anger in adulthood, she said. If, growing up, parents expressed their anger in an inappropriate way, or repressed it altogether, the child may follow suit later. This is also how abusive behavior gets passed down from one generation to the next, she said.

“You can actually form a belief that this is how it is — we can unlearn that if we begin to be aware of it,” she said.

It’s important to understand the root of your anger, and use the sense of unfairness to become stronger, Goldman said. Think about how you can deal with the things that make you mad in a more rational fashion.

In the moment, thinking about the consequences of an action driven by anger can help stop you from going too far, he said.

Another approach is to close your eyes and think of something calming — a loved one, a spiritual being, a beautiful sunset or a piece of music that you adore, Lantz said. Meditation also helps.

Seek professional help when your anger is interfering with your ability to function in relationships, Goldman said. It doesn’t take aggression for such feelings to get out of hand; if you’re unable to move forward with your life because you’re still mad at someone for something, there’s a problem.

One client Goldman is counseling is still stuck on the fact that his mother wasn’t invited to a bar mitzvah on the wife’s side of the family. The couple is getting divorced.

“Holding a grudge really impacts your relationship, and it’s empowering another person to control you,” he said.

Anger isn’t just bad for marriage; it can also affect your health. A 2009 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that anger triggers electrical changes in the heart, which can predict future arrhythmias in some patients.

Mark Farparan also has health issues from anger — he has a condition of chronic pain and fatigue called fibromyalgia, and these days when he gets too worked up about something, his energy will be drained for hours. The breathing exercises that he and his wife learned in Lamaze class have helped him calm down in moments of frustration.

Farparan, 52, considers himself “Mr. Mellow” now, but that’s not how it always was. When his 12-year-old son was 3, Farapan once got so mad at the child that he punched a door instead of him.

“I started again in a marriage at a late time, and being a father again was kind of rough,” said Farparan, who has a 26-year-old from his first marriage and two children from his second. “I guess I was having sort of like a post-partum.”

Farparan has not done that again. Beyond the breathing, his mellowing over the past several years has to do with age, he said.

“I don’t have much time left on this Earth. I’m not going to waste it being angry,” he said.

Working overtime may harm the heart

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Health

People who worked overtime tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress.

By Sarah Klein, Health.com

May 11, 2010 2:39 p.m. EDT
Employee Feeling Stressed and Overworked.jpgSTORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Study: Doctors should see long working hours as a potential risk factor for heart disease
  • People who worked overtime were healthier in other ways
  • They were also more likely to exhibit “Type A” personality traits
  • All of the study participants were white-collar workers in England

(Health.com) — If you’ve been saying for years that long hours at work are killing you, forward this article to your boss–it might literally be true. According to a new study, people who work more than 10 hours a day are about 60 percent more likely to develop heart disease or have a heart attack than people who clock just seven hours a day.

It’s not clear why this is, but the researchers suggest that all that time on the job means less free time to unwind and take care of yourself. Stress may also play a role–but not as much as you might think. Working long hours appears to hurt your heart even if you don’t feel particularly stressed out, the study found.

“Balance between work and leisure time is important,” says the lead author of the study, Dr. Marianna Virtanen, M.D., an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and University College London. “If you work long hours, the fact is that you may be exposed to higher stress levels and you do not have enough time to take care of your health.”

Doctors “should include long working hours on their list of potential risk factors” for heart disease, she adds.

Health.com: Head-to-toe solutions for stress

Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues followed more than 6,000 British civil servants with no history of heart disease for an average of 11 years. The participants were all drawn from a larger, ongoing study known as Whitehall II that began in 1985.

During the study, a total of 369 people had heart attacks (some of them fatal) or were diagnosed with heart disease after seeking medical attention for chest pain.

Compared to people who worked seven hours a day, those who worked 10 to 12 hours a day had a 56 percent increased risk of heart disease, heart attack, or death. Those who worked for 8 to 10 hours a day were not at increased risk.

The findings are “sort of a wakeup call,” says Dr. Gordon McInnes, M.D., a professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Glasgow, in the U.K., who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. Doctors should be extra vigilant about the heart health of patients who work long hours, he says.

Health.com: 10 free ways to fight depression

The study doesn’t say how, exactly, long hours at work might affect heart health. To try to pinpoint the effect of work time, Dr. Virtanen and her colleagues took a range of health factors into account in their analysis, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, diet and exercise, and whether or not the participants smoked. They also factored in the workers’ rank and salary, since socioeconomic status has been linked to heart health.

Health.com: 10 ways to stop work-related back pain

In some ways, the people who worked overtime were healthier than those who worked just seven hours a day. They were less likely to drink heavily and smoke, for instance, and they got more exercise. On the other hand, they tended to sleep less and reported experiencing more stress, having more demanding jobs, and having less control over their work.

They were also more likely to exhibit “Type A” personality traits. Type A behavior includes aggressiveness, irritability, and a “chronic, incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time,” according to the study.

But the workers who burned the candle at both ends were still at greater risk of heart disease even when all of these factors were accounted for, which suggests that something besides stress, personality, and behaviors such as smoking may be responsible.

Health.com: Stress-busting gadgets that really work

Still, workplace stress may have affected the study’s findings in spite of the researchers’ attempts to control for it, says Dr. McInnes. “I personally think stress was involved,” he says. “These people did a lot of extra work, which I would think is stressful. But it’s very difficult to be sure.”

Peter Kaufmann, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Washington, D.C., says that this type of study (known as an observational study) can’t prove whether long hours directly increase heart risk. For instance, Kauffman says, it’s possible that the workers’ overall lifestyle–including type A behavior–contributed to the long hours and the heart risk observed in the study.

“You would expect people who are more driven and more impatient to work longer hours to get things done,” Kaufmann says. “But they may be equally driven and impatient with the people around them, family and friends. They may have disorganized work habits and lives. Or [the long hours] may reflect failed social relationships or that they use work as a means to escape.”

Health.com: The best foods for your heart

The study had other limitations. The researchers only measured blood pressure and hours worked at the start of the study, and were therefore not able to track how these factors may have interacted over time, McInnes says. Blood pressure can be affected by stress and can in turn cause heart problems.

In addition, as the study notes, the researchers did not know whether the workers had been diagnosed with anxiety or depression, both of which have been linked to heart disease.

Lastly, all of the study participants were white-collar workers in England, which means the findings may not apply to all workers everywhere.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

Job strain ups heart-attack risk in women

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Health
By Anne Harding, Health.com
November 14, 2010 8:06 a.m. EST
Stressed businesswoman at laptop in officeWomen whose jobs require them to work “very hard” or “very fast” are 88 percent more likely to have a heart attack.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Women with demanding jobs twice as likely to have a heart attack as peers with easier jobs
  • Those with a lot of job strain were 43 percent more likely to need heart surgery
  • Women who are worried about losing their jobs are more likely to be physically inactive
  • Women are more likely than men to experience job strain

(Health.com) — Women with very demanding jobs are nearly twice as likely to have a heart attack as their peers in more easygoing occupations, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School analyzed 10 years of survey and medical data on more than 17,000 women in the health profession. The women, who were enrolled in a long-running study on heart disease, were all in their 50s or early 60s when the study began.

The women who said their job requires them to work “very hard” or “very fast” but who have little say over their day-to-day tasks — a combination known as “job strain” — were 88 percent more likely than those in less-stressful jobs to have a heart attack.

They were also 43 percent more likely to need heart surgery, according to the study, which was presented Sunday at an annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Chicago.

Health.com: Job killing you? 8 types of work-related stress

In addition, women who were stressed out by work — or worried about losing their jobs — were more likely than those with steady employment to be physically inactive and to have high cholesterol. (Job insecurity by itself did not appear to increase the risk of heart attack, however.)

“This new data is among the most important to emerge in recent years concerning the relationship between job strain and cardiovascular health,” says Peter Kaufmann, Ph.D., a researcher at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute who has studied mental health and heart disease but was not involved in the new research.

Doctors and other experts in the field need to do more to help people manage work-related stress, Kaufmann adds. The findings “emphasize that progress is needed urgently in this arena,” he says.

Health.com: Head-to-toe solutions for stress

The increased risk of heart attack seen in the study can’t be attributed solely to health or socioeconomic factors. To zero in on job strain, the researchers controlled for age, race, education, and income, as well as blood pressure, body weight, and cholesterol.

And even though all of the women in the study were health professionals, it was a “very socioeconomically diverse” group that included doctors, nurses, dietitians, and researchers, says the lead author of the study, Dr. Michelle Albert, M.D., a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston.

Much of the research to date on job stress and heart health has been done in men. But women are more likely than men to experience job strain, not to mention stress related to home and family demands, says Paul Landsbergis, Ph.D., an associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, in Brooklyn.

Health.com: I was too busy for heart disease — until it almost killed me

“The results certainly imply that we need to do more to make jobs healthier,” Landsbergis says. One way to accomplish this, he adds, might be to give individual workers more control over their jobs through collective bargaining and other types of organizing.

For her part, Albert recommends some simple steps to help women limit the impact of work-related stress: Exercise regularly, try to leave your work at the workplace, and take 10 to 15 minutes a day to relax and concentrate on your physical, mental, and emotional health. It’s also important to have a network of family and friends to help you cope, she says.

Health.com: 25 ways to really relax this season

“We’re never going to be able to get rid of stress — some stress is positive, actually,” Albert says. “The negative aspects of stress we’re going to need to learn how to manage.”

The AHA’s annual Scientific Sessions meeting highlights the latest heart-related research and treatment advances. Unlike studies published in medical journals, the research presented at the meeting has not been vetted by independent experts in the field.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

Corporate Massage can reduce tension of dis-satisified employees

Commentary August 12, 2010, 5:00PM EST

Dreaming of Steven Slater

The airline worker’s dramatic exit from his job seemed to spring from the collective imagination of a hot, angry, overworked, and underpaid America

By Devin Leonardimgres

Click here to find out more!

What’s remarkable about the case of Steven Slater, the JetBlue (JBLU) flight attendant who quit his job in magnificent style on Aug. 9, is not that an airline worker would snap after an encounter with an unruly passenger on a mid -morning Pittsburgh-to-JFK run. It’s that so much of the rest of the country applauded. While possibly committing several serious violations of federal law, Slater’s every move”using the plane’s P.A. system to curse at a rude customer whose bag had landed on his head, politely thanking the other passengers, grabbing two beers from the galley before sliding down the inflatable emergency chute and sprinting toward home”seemed to spring from the collective imagination of a hot, angry, overworked, and underpaid America.

Headline writers describing the incident invoked Johnny Paycheck’s No. 1 country hit from the hard times of 1977, Take This Job and Shove It. Most of them, however, missed the twist that gives the song its emotional weight: The singer never works up the courage to leave his detested factory job. He simply fantasizes about having “the nerve to say” it, the way so many Americans dreamed themselves into Slater’s JetBlue shoes.

Slater “a 20-year veteran of the airline industry who gushes on his MySpace page about his commitment to his career” was lounging in bed with his boyfriend when the police came to arrest him at his Queens (N.Y.) home. As they perp-walked him past the cameras, Slater grinned from ear to ear, as if to tell his fellow Americans: “It feels great!

The public response was swift and overwhelming. People created dozens of Facebook pages with names such as “Steven Slater: Hero of the Working Man.” Two days after his arrest the pages had attracted more than 180,000 fans. The admirers were soon sharing quitting stories of their own, occasionally with details about the boss they told off. More often they shared their dreams of doing so. On a page called “Can Steven Slater Get More Fans Than Justin Bieber?” a Facebook user named Karen Bonner struck a typically wistful note: “I wish I had the nerve…,” she wrote.

We are deep into what is so far the hottest year in recorded history, and into the second year of a prolonged economic slump. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5 percent, with an additional 7 percent of Americans either holding in part-time positions or no longer looking for work and thus no longer even counted as unemployed. A grim new noun has entered the lexicon “99ers,” people whose 99 weeks of extended jobless benefits have all run dry. No wonder the vast majority of people who have jobs aren’t about to give up a steady paycheck, no matter what indignities are visited upon them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t secretly ready to explode. “Slater tapped into a vein of anger that a lot of people have toward their employers,” says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement firm. “They are mad about all the layoffs they’ve gone through at work. They are mad about having their benefits cut.”

In such an environment you might expect to find more Steven Slaters. Despite some of the recent boasting on Facebook, few people are giving notice. Though the economy showed fitful signs of life earlier this year, people didn’t head for the exit chute; the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the rate of people quitting barely budged from January through May. And that was before consumer confidence plunged and economists started talking about the possibility of a double-dip recession. In a job market like this, almost everybody feels expendable. It’s the job “however unsatisfying it may be” that’s hard to replace.

Sandwiched between these phenomena, employees feel mounting pressure. Last year, according to the federal government, worker productivity climbed 3.5 percent as companies shed millions of employees and figured out ways to get more work from those who remained. It was the biggest increase in six years and great for corporate profits. It was considerably less great for workplace morale. According to Towers Watson (TW), a benefits consulting firm, employee engagement, or loyalty, declined by 9 percent in 2009. Until the recovery picks up, however, those disengaged workers are staying on.

Maybe the best they can do is reach for a second beer, turn the A/C to deep freeze, and live vicariously through Slater. He has been charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief, and faces seven years in prison. Yet only the hardest of hearts would deny him whatever monetization he can muster in return for this welcome moment of wish fulfillment. (Especially since he’s caring for his ill mother, herself a veteran of the airline industry.) If nothing else, Slater made a lot of Americans laugh at a grim moment in the life of the country. “What’s so great about this is that it’s a real life,” says Challenger. “It’s not scripted. It could have been scripted. I love the fact that he took two beers. If I was a beer company, I’d capitalize on that right away.”

Those in corporate America who don’t sign him up as a spokesperson would be wise to ponder Slater’s case. His admirers may not be as brave or impetuous as their hero, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be heading for the exits as soon as the economy picks up and new opportunities present themselves. As one of his fans, maskedscheduler, wrote on Twitter: “On behalf of all of us thinking about creative ways of leaving our jobs, screw you Steven Slater for setting the bar ridiculously high.”

Leonard is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.