Want your massage to feel big and confident? Here are 5 exercises to help you throw your weight around and make your massage feel profound (without working too hard).
0:00 Introduction: Why confidence-building exercises?
1:41 Exercise 1: Bear-walking
3:50 Two ways of throwing your weight around
4:37 Exercise 2: Dragging skin, tearing a phonebook
6:49 Exercise 3: Jostling
9:30 Exercise 4: Tiger claws
11:15 Exercise 5: Throwing a fireball
13:24 Bringing it all together into a sample massage
These aren't necessarily massage techniques that could immediately be applied in a session, but they can teach you a lot about how to use your body to affect your client's experience on the table. Think about how a stroke down the back would feel if given two ways: One, the therapist is using their arm and shoulder muscles to press really hard so that it feels deep. Two, the therapist is pouring their body weight into straight arms and letting that give a feeling of depth.
Think of a stroke up the leg given two ways: In both, the pressure is right, but in one, there's enough "oomph" to cause rippling movement throughout the body.
I should clarify that these big, bombastic movements aren't the "right" way to do massage. There are a lot of right ways to do massage! Massage can use small tools and arm muscles and still feel great and be effective. All I'd like from these exercises is for you to experience the difference, after which you can mindfully make a choice: How do I want my massage to feel in this moment? If I want it to feel big right now, what's stopping me? This is about getting over mental hurdles as much as figuring out new ways of using your body. Trust your client with your body weight, communicate thoroughly, and you'll find so many "right" ways to do the work we do. Let me know what you think in the comments!
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