Meet Garth
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Garth won’t be hanging up his dancing shoes anytime soon.
Garth, 75, is able to remain active as a ballroom dancing instructor thanks in part to massage therapy.
Garth considers dancing his sport, and like other sports he believes that if you have muscles that are tight and hindering your movement, you need to deal with that. He finds that while bandaging the area or trying pain killers may offer him temporary relief, the relief he gets from massage therapy is more permanent.
“Massage will go further and over a short period provide much longer relief,” he said. “And follow up will usually lead to faster recovery.”
He has turned to massage therapy after many difficult incidents, including a knee replacement in 2010. After his knee replacement, Garth had difficulty using the joint, and turned to massage therapy to help him to regain some mobility.
“Things get knotted up and massage helps to keep things flexible and soft,” Garth explained.
He also found massage therapy very helpful after a serious injury at age 50. He was working as a technician at the time, and their equipment was being installed in a new build at the shipyard, so the location was busy with many things going on. Someone was using a piece of pipe as a lever, they lost control of it, and it flew 30 feet from where they were working striking Garth just above the knee.
This incident left Garth with nerve damage, and he lost sensation from the outside of his knee to just over his mid-thigh. That injury also caused him extreme pain especially while he was teaching dance regularly. Massage therapy was able to offer him relief.
“I would get a burning sensation and it would become painfully tight,” Garth explained. “Massage was able to loosen things up and keep me functioning.”
Garth is still passionate about dance, and still teaches ballroom dancing although at a much slower pace than he did before. Even at a slower pace, he is still teaching once a week for three hours, and dances socially several times a month. Sometimes his dancing can be particularly hard on his feet.
“Sometimes you are unable to select your preferred floor surface and end up on concrete, plantar faciitis results,” he explained.
Dancing is a major passion for Garth, and that passion bloomed when he volunteered in Africa in his youth with Canadian University Students Oversees (CUSO). As a single male who didn’t drink and could dance, he was considered an acceptable escort for single women in the various embassies of the city he lived and worked in. It wasn’t until he was about 45, after taking dance lessons with his wife for five years, that he began teaching dance at the suggestion of a teacher.
There are many who would not be able to continue dancing at 75, but keeping up with regular massage therapy treatments has been one of the factors that help Garth continue to be able to dance.
He credits his level of activity with helping him to recover from a heart attack at age 63 and a stroke at age 68.
After his stroke in particular, he was left temporarily unable to read and write. Although there were no more obvious physical deficits, he had no conscious control or awareness of his left side, specifically his left hand. That gave him some difficulties with his dancing.
“I could still dance, but had problems with leading as I did not always know where my left hand was,” he explained. “But six weeks post stroke I was again teaching with my wife.”
Garth has faced many injuries, illnesses, and of course regular wear and tear over the course of his life. Massage therapy remains one of his go-tos to keep him on the dance floor.