Who is the MOST Influential Person in the Massage & Bodywork Industry Over the Last 100 Years?

There are so many people that have contributed to the #massage and bodywork industry to make it what it is today. Like any other industry there are influences that come externally into the profession and those that come from within the profession to change how we work how we are educated or how we are marketed. This is my opinion on the matter and is open to a broad sense of interpretation based on other peoples experience in education and also how long they've been in the profession because they may or may not have run into some of these very influential people in the past. When I consider all the people that have made a considerable influence on the industry in the last hundred years I try and put them into two categories: first one is the individuals who worked with the most advanced techniques and then brought those techniques to the practitioners. The second: are those people who contribute to the growth or popularization of the industry in a positive or more interestingly productive way. 

So for example the founder of a franchise chain might be considered a person that contributed to the growth of the industry where as somebody who developed a technique that is now a revolutionary advancement in the safety or speed at which the body is helped by bodywork or massage might me consider just as important by practitioners and by the general public at large. Ida Rolf would be consider to be at least in my opinion the most influential bodyworker on the 20th century. There are many notable people in the last 200 years I have contributed to modern massage therapy and wait in the United States but around the world.  Her contribution to modern understanding of biomechanics and motion transegrity compensation patterns change the nature of the industry. Her techniques are tight all over the world for many reasons including her insistence that modern medicine and massage therapy done properly could work closely together without conflict. 

Her work is not commonly known by the general public for a multitude of reasons the most important being that she believed that practitioners and doctors should be the thrust of her work not getting all the riding to the general public. However it should be noted that in her lifetime she was very well known for working with groups of people instead of individual therapist as well and also she was a strong proponent of video documentation and photography whenever possible. It is widely known she did this for two reasons: the first one being that she wanted to be taken more seriously and she felt that using avenues typically reserved for medical professionals would give her an advantage. The second is that it is also believed she wanted to future generations to have a clear understanding of her methods in film seem to be a extremely useful tool to that end.

If you have any questions like always please go to my website https://www.tonyschwartzbodywork.com/ and contact me with any additional questions you might have.