A Guide To Chinese Massage

The true power of Chinese massage, tui na and acupressure is the ability to diagnose what's going on with the patient. So, it's something that's going to be very difficult to do on a how-to video but I can give you a demonstration of partly how we demonstrate diagnosis within the musculoskeletal position of tui na Chinese massage. Alright, Terry here has a very common posture in today's society, particularly with working on desks, with working or driving cars a lot, using computers, mobile phones, so we can see the shoulders are slightly hunched forward and we can see that the neck is slightly pulled forward and very often, this comes from a tightness of the muscles in front of the neck here, the sternocleidomastoid muscles and the pectoral muscles and the intercostal muscles were being very tight.

This gives the illusion that there's a lot of tension in the shoulder region here and the base of the occiput of the neck here. So, what we'd usually do in this situation is we've helped her become aware with what's going on by working with her breath and combining that with tui na techniques to open up the pectoral area. So, if you face forwards.

Alright, so the tension in the neck is coming from this tension, the pectorals, and tension to the sternocleidomastoid and intercostals, and this area is very tender to work with so we have to be very careful and very gentle with working in this area. So if I work into this area, we find that this area feels almost like it's boned. So, what happens is that the muscles almost become calcified.

The muscle has been so tensed for holding and supporting the neck in the right position for so long, that it has to leak calcium from the bones and almost become like bone itself in its structural components of the body. What we want to do is help her to have freedom to have her neck in any position she wants. So, we're going to work with a gentle massage technique to increase the blood flow through these areas.

So, the first technique we're going to work with is ro fa and we're going to work with a gentle rolling technique. So, with the ro fa, we're working with the surface of the skin, so we're moving the skin in circular techniques. And it's a very nice technique because it helps to find areas where the tension is high but also treat at the same time.

So as I press this area, how does that feel? Tender. Yes, these areas are going to be very tender. It can make people slightly nauseous with a very deep sort of ache happening like when you have very very tight muscles.

But what we want to do is make sure that we don't work with such a strong pressure. Is that pressure okay? Yeah. Excellent, and what we can do at the same time is we can see how all these muscles are working in combination with our techniques.

So, we can see Terry has a hard time letting go of her arm. So, she's moving her own and she's not being very lazy. So, it's my job to make sure she's as lazy as possible.

So, if you'd like to relax your arm as much and we could feel that there's a little holding, a tension happening in the pectoral muscles. This is also giving our clues of where she holds her tension at a posture, a posture tension that we could help her to relax. Now, she just has normal massage.

Massage is going to be like painkiller Aspirin which is going to do a little bit of good job for a few weeks, if I'm really good, maybe a few months. But her habits are going to create the problem again. So, we need to help her to become aware of her habits and to do this, we need to really work with her breathing and we're going to work with making her aware of how she holds her tension in her body.

So, we can see that I take my arm away, there's a guarding perhaps here and she tends to hold a lot of tension into this area here and this area here, and as a consequence, when you work, you'll find it to be very very tight. And is that tender there? Yeah. Now, if we see the way she's breathing, bre