MELT Stories: Nancy Mink discovered MELT – and so much more
Nancy Mink almost never became a MELT instructor, let alone a Master Trainer, one of the six instructors trained to teach others how to teach MELT. She almost never found MELT at all, having tried to walk out of a presentation by MELT creator Sue Hitzmann at a fitness convention in 2006.
“I thought I was going into a foam roller class – only to find out it was a lecture! I was ready to walk out when one of the attendants shut the door on me. I didn’t want to be disrespectful, so I stayed,” she recalls. “Within the first few minutes, I was totally captivated. That day I bought the roller and balls and signed up for the next instructor training. I started MELTing on a regular basis.”
If you meet Nancy, you can imagine her as a showgirl. Tall, thin, and vibrant, she exudes confidence. But the pain of daily shows in her twenties was starting to take its toll.
After Nancy decided to end her dance career, she went on to teach cardio, body conditioning, and Pilates classes. She became a massage therapist and a Reiki practitioner. She started “mashing her fascia” with a hard roller – anything to feel better. “Pain persisted and would creep up on me unexpectedly. I’d had enough,” she says. “I thought it was time to embark on a quest to find the ‘missing link’! Was there a way to fix myself?”
During this quest, she attended the fitness convention in New York City that changed everything. “I felt like MELT was the missing link I had been searching for,” she says. “Not only could I take care of my own body, I could teach others to take care of theirs!”
Even after severely hurting her back when she took part in a stretching demo gone wrong, Nancy used MELT exclusively to recover in just four weeks, without painkillers or having to see a doctor.
“With MELT I’ve had 10 years of a-ha moments. I even sleep with a half roller by my bedside and when I can’t fall asleep for whatever reason, I bring the roller into bed with me, then do some Rebalancing and reassess. It feels so good! When I get off the roller, I feel like I’m on a luxurious featherbed,” says Nancy. “MELT is my sleeping pill, one that is all natural and has no side effects.”
A trained Pilates instructor, Nancy was drawn to MELT for Pilates, a unique blend of MELT and Pilates that uses MELT to prepare, assess, and assist the body, allowing for better alignment, balance, and precision whether you’re using the Pilates apparatus or doing the mat work. “My clients are benefitting from better body sense and performing the moves with more ease and less strain,” she reports.
A resident of New York City since 2004, Nancy has given up teaching many of her conditioning and body shaping classes to focus on teaching MELT, MELT for Pilates, and MELT NeuroStrength, which focuses on the stability of the shoulder girdle, hip girdle, and core.
“MELT has made my life so much better in every way,” says Nancy. “And it’s so great that I am able to heal myself.”
Nancy’s former chiropractor even called her out of the blue asking about where she had been: “I had to tell him that I was sorry but I didn’t need him any more since I discovered MELT.”