Most massage therapy schools and courses in Australia, the United States and England are designed to be between 6 months and two years long. But does this make their class better?

Quantity does not always equal quality. Many of these massage courses are filled with hundreds of hours of learning scientific jargon that is not relevant to the real world practice of massage. When a person wants to study massage therapy they must ask what does it take to be a good massage therapist?

Is a good therapist someone who can recite Latin anatomical jargon while talking to a patient/client or is a good massage therapist someone who can help people alleviate some problem that they have and/or generally make them feel better.

In this way we must look at what is the goal of massage therapy and then we must judge all training based on whether that training is going to help us achieve that goal. In other words a person may do 500 or 5000 hours of training but how relevant is the training that a person does?

There are two distinct goals of massage therapy. The first is to produce a nice relaxing feeling while receiving the massage treatment. Usually Swedish massage, lymphatic drainage and some types of Beauty Therapy massage fit into this category. The other goal of massage therapy is to alleviate tension in the muscles of the body, increase the circulation of blood and lymph and in the Eastern forms of acupressure massage philosophy, to increase the flow of chi (life force) through the meridians.

Therefore when choosing a school at which to study, a prospective student should consider whether the particular courses that they are going to study will aid in these goals and what is the quickest and most cost effective and interesting way to achieve the goal of becoming an excellent massage therapist.Brandon Raynor is a world innovator in massage and naturopathic training courses. His school, Brandon Raynor's School of Natural Therapies has been instrumental in making massage training programs more relevant to the actual needs of becoming an excellent massage therapist.