Nice!!

I've never had Graston done, but I had gua sha once, which is a TCM technique that's supposed to be the inspiration for Graston. Left some crazy marks, but no residual soreness. My experience with a lot of deep tissue work is that the amount of soreness that lingers for more than a day after treatment, really depends on the condition the muscle and fascia were in before. It's not necessarily the oldest stuff, either (that's usually the least painful, because it's so shut off, until it really starts functioning close to normally, when it can hurt). I pretty much always get stippled bruising if I roll my ITBs with a spiky stick, but they're never sore more than a day, even when a bodyworker gets into them super deep. Last week my suboccipitals were crazy tight, and they were sore for four or five days after my LMT released them, which is extremely unusual.

But for sure too, different practitioners have different approaches to a patient's pain tolerance. My chiropractor in Florida seems to have a very keen sense of it - there are newspaper photos on his wall, of him treating an NBA star, and the athlete grimacing. He can take me near my limit, but so far never past it. Then there are patients I overhear, who either have very limited pain tolerance, or are already in so much pain that anything additional is nearly too much, and he's only taking them to their limit. My northern chiropractor, on the other hand - I've never had an LMT who hasn't commented on my pain tolerance, but there were a couple of times when she was into my infraspinati, that I was literally holding back tears. Holey moley. I have a very high opinion of both of their skill, their understanding of fascial relationships and their ability to release adhesions, but they just have a different set of expectations from their patients.