Liliane Sklenarik gets two responses when she tells people she gives massages with her feet.
The first group shudders at the mere thought of someone's bare feet moving up and down their bodies. The second can't wait to sign up.
"Some people have issues with feet," said Sklenarik, who practices various types of massage at her business, Massage Therapy for Health. "I've explained what I do, even to other people who do massages, and I've had that reaction. But the people who try it love it. Once you get started, it doesn't feel like a foot. It feels like a really big hand."
Sklenarik only recently started to offer ashiatsu bar massage, the formal name for barefoot massage, a practice that originated in Kerala, India. "Ashi" means "foot" and "atsu" means "pressure" - ashiatsu allows Sklenarik to give greater pressure to a client's muscles and spread it out over a wider area.
This is not walking on a client's back. When Sklenarik started studying ashiatsu, her husband, Edward Payne, a carpenter, built her a wooden structure to frame the platform on which her clients lie. Sklenarik holds onto the structure, both for balance and to control the amount of weight and pressure on the client.
The technique also gives some relief to Sklenarik, whose hands can get tired after a long day of traditional massage. She offers massages for relaxation as well as for pregnant women, but the bulk of her clients are looking for deep tissue work.
Ashiatsu "allows me to go in even deeper. It really puts you in a zone - it's intensely relaxing," Sklenarik said.
Deep tissue massage is especially helpful for clients who need to focus on a specific area, whether it's a stressed muscle from sports or a healing injury. The massage increases blood flow into the muscle, ultimately causing it to relax.
Sklenarik, 42, didn't start out in the massage business. She worked for years as a process engineer and took a massage course on a whim at the Bancroft School of Massage Therapy in Worcester. Friends who benefited from her homework encouraged her to take up the practice full time - and a 2001 layoff cemented her urge to take on a new career.
"The work as an engineer was just OK," she said. "It didn't fulfill me in any way, and the massage does. All I get to do is help people all day - that's a nice way to live."
Clients visit her in cycles. In the spring, she sees a lot of runners, both before and after the Boston Marathon. Summer brings in golfers. She also has a lot of regulars who consider massage to be part of their basic health maintenance program.
"Sometimes it's uncomfortable, but it shouldn't be painful," Sklenarik said. "It should never be so uncomfortable that a person is trying to crawl away from me. That's not going to relax a muscle. When you finish a deep tissue massage, you should always feel better than when you came in. You may feel some soreness over the next few days like you've exercised - but if you come in in pain, you did something to get that way. You need to put up with a bit more pain to get rid of it."
Contact Jennifer Lord of The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham, Mass.) at 508-626-3880 or jlord@cnc.com.
author: By Jennifer Lord