Marketplace: With massage, a Parkite finds a passion - The Park Record

[massage]

Alex Anderson traces his passion for massage to his childhood, when his father would pay him a penny for scratching his back.

A couple of decades later, Anderson, a Park City High School graduate, has turned that spark into a career. A licensed massage therapist, he provides in-home massages and neural muscular release therapy — a modality that purports to release built-up trauma and physical memory from the body through deep massage — through the company he founded, Quantum Leap Activation.

"Those pennies are what started it all," he said.

Despite being interested in massage from an early age, Anderson didn't initially set out to pursue it as a career. But after a few semesters at the University of Utah and Utah Valley University trying to settle on a career path, he began to become interested in Eastern medicine like acupuncture and other healing arts. That's when it clicked. He enrolled in the Utah College of Massage Therapy and hasn't looked back since.

"I applied myself like I hadn't since middle school because I found that passion," he said. "You find the passion — boom. Run towards it. This is super important to me."

Anderson started his career offering the typical massage experience one might expect in a standard spa. After a few years, however, he was introduced to neural muscular release therapy. He said the therapy, which consists of two long sessions spread out over two days, is aimed at allowing the body to regenerate itself. The result is an improvement in how both the body and mind feel, he said.

He believes strongly in neural muscular release therapy because of his own personal experience with it, he said.

"I came out just feeling like, 'Alright, let's do this,'" he said. "To be able to give the word, you need to first receive it. Just like with chiropractic or acupuncture. You need to receive it so you know what the person you're treating is going through. Especially with a journey as powerful as this. It's a powerful journey, so to know what it's like is important."

Anderson's goal is to not only perform the service for clients but to educate them about what's happening within their bodies, as well. In his view, it's critical for people to understand how their bodies work and what they can do to get them working in peak condition. He believes many of the tenets of massage should be common knowledge — not simply reserved for people who go through massage school — because of the benefits it delivers.

"We all operate on touch," he said. "So it's so incredibly important to find a therapist who does more than just touch your engine parts but knows how to make them purr, who knows how to get you back to a state of homeostasis and then teach you about that. Teach a man how to fish, so he doesn't just eat the fish you provide."

Park City has been the perfect place for Anderson, born and raised in the town, to build a clientele. He said the active nature of Park City, and Parkites' openness to different forms of wellness, has allowed his business — which was previously called Heartland BodyWorks — to flourish.

"People care about their bodies," he said. "You have a high amount of people who really want to stay in tip-top condition and massage therapy is huge here. It's really competitive. You have some of the top spas in the country in Park City. And to be one of a very select group of people who can do this neural muscular work is a deep honor to bring it to this community."

Anderson intends to offer his services in Park City for a long time. But he also envisions using the town as a hub for his travels, trekking around the country to perform massage and neural muscular release therapy wherever he sees fit before returning home.

"Travel is very important to me," he said. "So the ability to go wherever I want to do what I love to do is amazing."

Quantum Leap Activation
435-659-6904
Quantumleapactivation.com (still in development)

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