How To Give A Chinese Massage

Tui na, Chinese massage and acupressure are all very similar. Usually, it took ten years to train to become a tui na practitioner and during that ten years, it was divided up to four main levels of treatments. The first level of treatment was to move the chi in the blood in regions of the body which we'll do a general form of massage.

The next level was working with specific acupuncture points and this will be acupressure. This is also where techniques such as shiatsu where we work with pressure points are also working with regions of the body where it really came to its own. If you look at the next section, they would work with holographic systems of the body.

So if you look at reflexology where people work with feet or hands or ears to affect one area of the body, you can affect the whole body and that would be how tui na evolved into its third level. Usually in Chinese massage, we would work with a specific diagnosis. But in this case, I'll give you a how-to approach to how to give it in Chinese massage.

We're going to give you a generic approach on how to do a neck and shoulder massage which will offer relaxation and stress-busting facilities. So, let's have a volunteer. We need a volunteer and we'll also need a chair.

So, working with the neck and shoulders, where you get her facing away, I want to use a gentle firm pressure, so usually starting up with circles and we're just going to open up the neck and shoulder area. And as you're doing this, you would want to feel where the person has most of the tension because that's where you want to focus on in terms of the most of the time that you spare and the vigorous use of techniques on these areas. So, we can work with circles with thumbs.

We can work with circles in the palms of the hands to hit broad areas and in tui na, we can call this technique rofa. So once you feel that the skin has started to move and the person has started to warm up, the muscles are starting to warm up, we can be a little more specific and go with the thumb as we find specific areas where there's tension and tenderness. Sometimes, you find the patient - the person will feel it to be a little intensive.

In which case, you can back up a little and you'll also want to explore the full range of the neck unless you find particular points where there's excessive tension held. You want to work with that in particular. So, just using these rofa techniques, we can have a very effective treatment by itself.

But you'll find that there's certainly a risk of them. And in this situation, we have a couple of other techniques that we can use to try and disperse this. In this case, we've got tension between the shoulder blades and the neck, large flat muscles and we're got tension in the spinal muscles in the neck.

So, we can use two techniques here. We can use a technique called pir fa which is the dispersing technique which would use a cupped hand very lightly. Work over the back, slightly into the neck and this would disperse large areas of the very tight muscles where the muscles would be like you're pushing it against it and then come back to feel what's going on.

The other technique which we can use is called na fa. So, what we do is we grab hold of a bit of the flesh and suddenly let go. Now, this can feel very dispersing.

It can feel very cooling and it can be very good for tension in the neck and shoulders, excessive and deficient headaches and generally, those office kinds of signs and symptoms that most people, most of us, get. So, coming back to our rofa again, and in this case, the neck and shoulders have relaxed very nicely and the neck is not very tight. So, we now want to focus the remainder of our efforts on the neck so you might want to go with na fa on a very small area.

So, we can just pinch with the index finger and thumb in local areas, and if someone's very tensed that they're not getting much blood flow to the muscles in these areas, so you very q