Save Your Hands!: The Complete Guide to Injury Prevention and Ergonomics for Manual Therapists

2025 THIRD EDITION

You became a therapist to help people—not to end up hurting yourself.

In the demanding professions of manual and massage therapy, pain and injury don’t have to be the price of doing the work you love. Yet many hands-on practitioners experience painful hands, achy backs, repetitive strain, and physical and emotional stress that can take a toll on their health and careers.

Save Your Hands! Third Edition gives you practical prevention strategies and easy-to-apply techniques to help you work with greater ease and confidence—and build a successful, healthy career for years to come.

More than a guide to any single problem or injury, Save Your Hands! Third Edition supports practitioners at every stage—from students learning safe practice to therapists dealing with pain, injury, body mechanics, or burnout, and experienced professionals who want to stay healthy throughout a long career.

Drawing on decades of expertise in injury prevention for manual therapists, Lauriann Greene combines evidence-based information on injury risk factors, biomechanics, ergonomics, and self-care with practical techniques and habits you can use every day.

Inside, you'll discover:

• Practical ergonomics and body mechanics strategies to reduce unnecessary strain, improve your workspace and techniques, and work with more ease, confidence, and efficiency.
• Body-saving conditioning and self-care programs designed for the physical demands of manual and massage therapy.
• Tools for managing workload and creating a sustainable practice that help you balance the demands of hands-on work with your own well-being.
• Illustrations, checklists, and practical daily job aids that make essential injury-prevention information accessible and easy to put into practice.

Don't wait until pain forces you to change your work life. Identify your risks, improve your workspace and techniques, and build habits that support your body as well as your clients’.

Protect your body. Prevent injury. Avoid burnout. Keep doing the work you love.

For students and professionals across the manual therapy professions, including massage therapists, physical therapists and physical therapist assistants, occupational and hand therapists, chiropractors, osteopaths, nurses, athletic trainers, and other hands-on healthcare professionals.

Lauriann Greene knows firsthand what it's like when the work you love takes a toll on your body. While training to become a massage therapist, she experienced an injury that changed the course of her career—and sparked a lifelong commitment to helping manual therapists stay healthy, comfortable, confident, and working in the profession they love.

Lauriann wrote the first edition of Save Your Hands! to fill a need she had experienced herself: practical, accessible guidance for preventing the injuries that can shorten a massage therapist's career. Since then, she has expanded her work to other manual therapists, taught injury-prevention workshops throughout North America, written articles and columns for numerous massage and spa publications, presented educational webinars, and spoken at many professional association conferences.

Through her workshops, teaching, Q&A sessions, and other interactions with thousands of practitioners, Lauriann has gained a deep understanding of the realities of hands-on work—from nagging aches and repetitive strain to the physical and mental stress that can eventually lead to burnout. These experiences, together with years of research and writing, have shaped the practical approach at the heart of Save Your Hands!. Lauriann understands that knowing what should be done is only part of the challenge. The real question is how to make healthier ways of working realistic and sustainable in the middle of a busy day with real clients.

The revised and updated Save Your Hands! Third Edition reflects more than two decades of work devoted to the health and safety of manual therapists. Save Your Hands! has become a valued resource in massage schools and related professional programs and has received acclaim from respected educators and clinicians, including Ben E. Benjamin, PhD, Sandy Fritz, and Susan Salvo.