We have looked at the importance of building a strong foundation of basic massage techniques. While those techniques can be applied across any massage treatment, they are typically used in Swedish massage or as complements to other types of manual therapy.

In the area of clinical massage, we as massage therapists must have an advanced level of skill. In order to provide effective treatment, a therapist must be able to identify varying aspects of the client's condition, as well as properly incorporate advanced manual therapy methods into a plan of care. In this chapter, we discuss several advanced techniques that will also be applied as part of a treatment sequence later in the book.