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 has been a leading writer, speaker and researcher on injury prevention and ergonomics for manual therapists for over 20 years. She studied at Brown and Harvard Universities before graduating with honors from Seattle Massage School. She wrote the first ever book on injury prevention for massage therapists (Save Your Hands! 1st Ed., out of print), then the 2nd edition (out of print) and in 2025 published the extensively revised, updated and expanded Save Your Hands! The Complete Guide to Injury Prevention and Ergonomics for Manual Therapists, 3rd Edition. Save Your Hands! is the leading Injury prevention and self-care text for manual therapists including physical therapists, massage therapists, occupational therapists, chiropractors, athletic trainers, osteopaths and more. The Save Your Hands! books have sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Now the leading authority on this subject, Lauriann has written numerous articles for major massage therapy and spa publications, speaks at leading conferences including ABMP and AMTA National and IECSC, and co-authored a 2006 study that produced the first statistics on work-related injury among American massage therapists. In 2006, Lauriann joined forces with ergonomist and massage therapist Rick Goggins and the ABMP on a study that produced the first reliable statistics on the prevalence of injury among massage therapists and bodyworkers. The results were published in 2006 in Massage and Bodywork. She also completed training to become a Certified Ergonomics Assessment Specialist (CEAS) at that time. Lauriann and senior ergonomics colleagues now offer injury prevention and ergonomics consulting and training services to spas, clinics and schools, to help them reduce costly workers' comp claims, absenteeism and turnover due to injury on the job. She also offers continuing education (CE) courses for massage therapists.

Richard W. Goggins, MS, CPE, LMP, is Board Certified as a Professional Ergonomist, and is a Licensed Massage Practitioner in Washington State. He has a bachelor's degree in biology from Columbia University, and a master's degree in Human Factors/Ergonomics from the University of Southern California (USC). During and following his time at USC, Rick worked for Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo, Calif., helping them to establish their ergonomics program. From there, he moved north to work for the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, where he is now Senior Ergonomist with their Division of Occupational Safety and Health. Through his work at Labor and Industries, Rick has helped employers in a variety of industries prevent injuries among their employees. He isfrequently asked to present talks and workshops on ergonomics at conferences around the country, and has written several articles on the subject for publications including Professional Safety, Journal of Safety Research and Massage & Bodywork. He is a past president of the Puget Sound Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and worked with that group on a project to educate schoolchildren on computer ergonomics.Rick first became interested in massage after receiving excellent treatment from several different massage therapists. He did his massagetraining at Alexandar's School of Natural Therapeutics in Tacoma, Wash., an experience that he still counts as one of his favorites. He is a professional member of the American Massage Therapy Association. Rick combined his in-depth knowledge of injury prevention and manual treatment work in his collaboration with Lauriann Greene on the first-ever injury survey among massage therapists, and on the 2008 second edition of Save Your Hands!

Janet M. Peterson, PT, DPT, has been performing injury prevention services for for over twenty-five years; she has had her own practice inergonomics consulting since 1998 in Seattle, Wash. Janet earned her master's degree in physical therapy from Stanford University and her doctorate in physical therapy through Temple University. She was on the Board of Directors for the American Physical Therapy Association and is a past president of the Physical Therapy Association of Washington, receiving the 2003 "Physical Therapist of the Year" award. She is a member of the Puget Sound Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and the Pacific Northwest Ergonomic Roundtable.