Thank you for joining us tonight at Incorporate Massage.
We're doing a demo of a chair massage.
For tonights purposes I am just going to be demo-ing the upper back, shoulders, neck and maybe a little bit of head. My demonstration is purposefully going to be geared toward people not using your thumbs as much as possible. I went to massage school at the age of 50 and I want to keep doing this until I'm in my 70s and maybe 80s. So, my thumbs are very important to me.
So tonight we're going to use a lot of elbow and forearm. My model is Stephanie.
So when you put your client in the chair you want to—come forward—make sure that they're comfortable, that everything's adjusted.
We want the chair to be holding the client up.
We don't want the client to be holding the chair up. That's not going to be a comfortable massage.
Every massage therapist has a little different way of introducing their touch.
So you don't want to go in there and just grab the client right away. You want to softly come in and let them get used to what your touch is. I will generally start with the shoulders like this.
Then just kind of move down the back so that the client gets used to me and isn't going to jump out of the chair.
I'm going to use a fist. The whole point is to keep your joints stacked.
My wrists are straight, my elbows are relatively straight and I'm using my body weight.
I'm not just using my hands. We come up to the top of the shoulder.
You're going to bring your fingers in and roll back toward the heel of your hand, pulling the trapezius together.
My thumbs aren't involved in this at all. Anytime that I use my thumbs I keep them straight and the whole motion comes from the entire arm, not the thumbs.
You don't want to just be moving your thumbs around like that because you'll wear out your joints.
You won't be a massage therapist very long—and everybody loves a massage therapist.
So now I'm going to come in with my elbow. And again, you're not going to just jump right in.
You want to lay your elbow down at about the bottom of the scapula is where we're going to start—right next to the spine.
And gently just sort of hook in and roll up onto the blade of your forearm.
It's a lot of compression work that I do.
How's that pressure, Stephanie?
Stephanie: It's good.
Ok.
And I generally try to do three lines up the back.
So there'll be one right next to the spine, then one between the spine and the scapula.
I'm just slowly working it up.
You'll try to keep your back as straight as possible.
The front knee is bent in lunge position and all the weight is coming off of my back leg.
The third line we're going to come like right around the medial border of the scapula.
The same thing with compressions. Rolling forward, and then up onto the top of the shoulder.
Then I'll go around with my fingers trying to keep my fingers stiff and together, making a little "C" scoop.
Feel all around the scapula.
Make little circles to see if there's any trigger points that didn't melt with those compressions.
You're always keeping your fingers together.
My thumb is usually just an anchor on the shoulder blade, depending on how some people have very wide shoulder blades so you're in the middle.
You can come down around the lateral edge of the scapula with your thumbs. Keep them, again, straight, joints stacked and work around the edges of the scapula. When we're doing corporate chair massage, a large percentage of what we'll do is going to be this upper back, neck, and shoulders.
I have found that a lot of people have trigger points up here in this top edge of the trapezius and I actually will work it from both sides in a circular motion.
It seems to release pretty fast that way.
In these compressions, my fingers are bringing the muscles to the heel of my hand.
Try to get a little bit of mobility in the shoulder.
To Stephanie: Drop your shoulder.
Grab the shoulder from underneath and then we're going to move it.
And again, use your body weight.
Don't just use your hands and your arms.
Use your entire body.
Now I'll come around to the front of the client.
Again, at this point my thumbs are pretty much the anchor.
I'm pretty much using the first three fingers, sometimes only two.
When you're on the client, making little circles, finding out if we have any more trigger points, working this area.
So stephanie has one right here.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to keep my fingers stiff on it here, just sort of monitoring that point.
I'm going to pick up the arm.
Make sure your client relaxes and just lets you do the work. And then I'm going to bring the shoulder to the trigger point.
Hold it for 15 to 30 seconds.
You'll feel it start to melt.
Then I'll usually move the shoulder a bit.
Move it around.
Again, I'm coming to the front of the client.
This time I'm using my thumbs again in a straight, stiff position so all the joints are stacked and I'm going to feel all along the top of the collar bone.
A lot of people get those trigger points or little knots in there.
You can work those out.
But the whole motion is coming from my arm and my body, not just the thumb.
Along the bottom of the collar bone.
You can work the shoulder joints, again, keeping your fingers together.
Most of the time when we're in an event situation where we're going pretty fast through clients, we don't really have a lot of time to use lotion.
You don't want to be gliding on a person's neck or their skin.
So what I'll do is I'll use my knuckles.
Actually just kind of try to hook it into the muscle, and then I'm going to be moving the muscle with my knuckles instead of gliding on the skin.
Try to keep your thumbs as loose as possible.
This allows you to go through, across several muscles at one time.
Coming up under the base of the skull I make my fingers into a little 'C'.
Come up under the base of the skull in little circular motions.
It will help release a lot of tension in the neck and the head.
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