Compression Techniques for a Swedish Massage

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Tunisia Woods and I’m back with your representing Hello Beautiful Mobile Massage Therapy Group, on behalf of Expert Village. Now, I want to show you some other Swedish massage strokes. The first one that I’m going to talk about is compressions. Now, compression is just compressing the muscle. Now, you can do compressions in several ways. The first that I’m going to show you is just with whole hand compressions. All compressions are just pushing your body weight down to your client. So you just want to just push down. Sometimes you might want to ask your client to take a deep breath. And on that release you just press down. That’s also loosening up muscle tissue. Take a deep breath for me. Sometimes you want to take a deep breath with your client so you can feel what’s going on. Another way you can do compressions is with your thumbs or your fingers. You can do short compressions where you just push down. You might just push down on the body. This is another way of just moving those muscle tissues, softening those muscle tissues up. You want to do that along the entire back or whatever area that you’re working on. Another thing is tapotement. Now, tapotement is usually done at the end of a massage. You will cover your client back up; this is at the end. You will start with several compressions just to make sure that your client is okay. The tapotement is just a light beating. You can use the sides of your hands. Just come up on your client and come down, or you can use the whole hand. Make sure that you cup it because you don’t want to just be beating on your client’s back. So if you cup your hands, then you can even do some drums. You can get your own rhythm. You hear that? You want it to be rhythmic. So, I want to go over it with you again. Compressions press down. Sometimes you can feel the muscle tissue releasing. Press down. Then tapotement. Or sides of hands. Thank you!"