What is the MELT Method?

The MELT Method® is a self-care practice designed to help you stay healthy, youthful, and active for a lifetime. Just ten minutes of MELT three times a week can reduce the tension and stress that accumulates in your body through daily living. You can fine-tune this practice to address your particular needs, eliminating chronic pain, decreasing the risk of injury, even improving athletic performance.

Applying the latest research in neurofascial science, MELT techniques draw upon these well-regarded modalities and the work of their originators: Neuromuscular Therapy (Chaitow), CranioSacral (Upledger), Manual Muscle Testing (Kendall and McCreary), Lymphatic Drainage (Chikly), Visceral Manipulation (Barral), Anatomy Trains (Meyers), and Structural Integration (Rolf).

Relaying this science through its accessible Living Body Model, MELT encourages people to understand their body’s structure and function in ways that are experiential, encouraging, and relevant to lifelong self-care..

How does MELT work?

Recent research has revealed the missing link to pain-free living: a balanced nervous system in relation with healthy connective tissue. The two components work together as a single neurofascial system to support your body’s structure and optimize mind-body communication.

MELT directly addresses your neurofascial system in ways no other self-care modality does, not even diet or exercise. MELT enhances your body’s ability to restore balance and repair itself, which can create remarkable, long-lasting changes. MELT offers natural pain relief, addressing the causes of chronic pain, not just masking its symptoms. Many see and feel results in their first session.

MELT techniques enlist a soft body roller and set of small balls to reconnect mind-body communication, rebalance the nervous system, rehydrate connective tissue, and release joint compression.

MELT’s latex-free tools relieve pain by remodeling fascia with non-traumatizing, indirect, active and passive, light-touch compression and lengthening. Its protocols help regulate sympathetic to parasympathetic tone, improve heart rate variability, and fine-tune motor control.

Focusing body awareness through assessments before and after each segment of a self-care session, MELT develops the mind-body integration that’s key to enjoying the long-lasting results you’re seeking.

Why is connective tissue important?

Daily living creates stress and tension within your body. Physical stressors can range from sitting at a desk to running a marathon. Emotional, mental, and environmental stressors also strain your body.

The repetitive stress of daily living literally gets stuck in connective tissue, a network of fibers embedded in a fluid matrix wrapping every joint, muscle, nerve, bone, and organ. “Stuck stress” accumulates in and dehydrates connective tissue, diminishing the nervous system’s capacity to regulate itself and hindering the body’s self-healing process.

This stuck stress leads to stiffness and aching, leading in turn to common health issues such as neck and low back pain, headache, insomnia, digestive problems, and injury. Aging accelerates and illnesses become chronic, often reducing options to medication, surgery, and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle.

But when your connective tissue is hydrated and free of stuck stress, your body functions efficiently and self-healing occurs daily. With its breakthrough techniques, MELT directly addresses stuck stress and slows down the aging process by rehydrating connective tissue and rebalancing the nervous system.

Who Is MELT for?

MELT is for anyone who wants to slow down the aging process and live a pain-free life.

It’s for women and men over 40 who want to stay active, mobile, and independent. It’s for active young adults and athletes who want to maintain a healthy body and optimize performance without incurring debilitating wear and tear. Even children can benefit from MELT.

If you are injured, post-surgery, pregnant, overweight, sedentary, out of shape — or if you have limited mobility, chronic pain, knee or hip replacements, or bone disorders — you can still MELT. It’s the best starting point for any exercise and wellness program.

MELT makes physical activity fun. Moving is a pleasure when your body feels good, you have more energy, and you’re free of pain.

How can MELT help me?

MELT is easy to learn and offers results the first time you do it. MELT can help you fall asleep more easily and sleep more soundly, have more energy during the day, improve your posture, reduce stress and tension, shed excess body fat, and even reduce the appearance of cellulite. Best of all, your body will feel great long after you MELT. The results that MELT provides have until now been available only through continuing treatment in a variety of expensive hands-on therapies.

What are the benefits of MELTing?

MELT helps people of all ages and abilities stay active. A whole-body self-care method, MELT can be customized to address your particular needs — such as reducing chronic joint pain, decreasing the risk of repetitive stress injuries, preventing falls, and improving athletic performance.

MELT increases ease of movement and sense well-being along with improving

  • Balance and stability
  • Alignment and posture
  • Flexibility and joint mobility
  • Digestion
  • Capacity for deep relaxation
  • Quality of sleep

MELT diminishes tension and stress, reducing

  • Aches and pains
  • Headaches
  • Risk for falls and other injuries

How often should I MELT?

You can experience immediate and long-lasting benefits by MELTing just ten minutes, three times a week. In fact, MELT is so gentle that most people can do it every day. Drinking a glass of water before and after you MELT, and sipping water consistently through the day, helps you achieve maximum results.

When will I see results?

MELT quickly rehydrates connective tissue and allows your body to release the accumulated tension and stress that leads to chronic pain. MELT is easy to learn and often offers results the first time you do it. Changes in alignment, flexibility, energy, mood, and performance occur within only a few sessions. Best of all, your body feels great long after you MELT. The results that MELT provides have until now been available only through continuing treatment in a variety of expensive hands-on therapies. MELT equips you to become an expert in self-care and take charge of your health.

Is MELT like myofascial release, yoga, Pilates, reflexology, or physical therapy?

MELT is unlike any other technique because it uniquely addresses the body’s neurofascial system — the nervous and connective tissue systems understood as a single unit. In contrast, exercise and rehabilitation typically address only the musculoskeletal system.

Because MELT complements other modalities, it can enhance the self-care you’re already doing. For example, MELTing before strength training improves muscle performance and joint alignment; MELTing after a cardio workout relieves joint compression, prevents stiffness, and speeds muscle recovery.

Has MELT been reviewed by experts?

MELT has been reviewed by internationally respected doctors, neuroscientists, and connective tissue researchers including Ben Domb, MD, Tom Myers, Gil Hedley, PhD, Robert Schleip, PhD, and Jean Pierre Barral, DO. Each expert has recognized that MELT is grounded in scientific principles and offers extraordinary benefits. Practitioners in fitness, sports, wellness, rehabilitation, and somatic psychology are using MELT in office and hospital settings.

Who created MELT?

Sue Hitzmann, MS, CST, NMT — a nationally-recognized exercise physiologist, manual therapist, and founding member of the Fascia Research Society — designed the MELT Method by applying groundbreaking research in neurofascial science to hands-on therapies.

Her New York Times bestselling book The MELT Method, published in eight languages and counting, has brought this self-care modality to more than 200,000 people around the world.