Massaging a Child With Growing Pains: Calf Muscles

Video Transcript

"So with your hands nice and warm go ahead and place them on the calf and we want to start out one calf at a time, first just placing your hands and walking down the length of the calf so that it gets nice and warm just through this very first nurturing touch, just walking down. Then we want to go ahead and start some relaxing gliding strokes so gliding down, gliding down nice and relaxing, making sure you are warming up one leg and then we want to warm up the other leg so again we are placing our hands. When you are moving from leg to leg make sure at all times you have at least one hand on the child's skin so they don't feel that big disconnect so keep one hand on at least at all times and place your warm hands walking down. Skin to skin contact and then we want to go ahead and do our nice soothing gliding strokes covering as much of the calf as you can. So we are using our entire hand, our entire palm, our thumb of our hand open and cupping the calf, just gliding down and making sure that we are covering as much as we can. Glide on that one and come back up to the knee and just glide on both. Nice and slow and relaxing. We are just getting this area warmed up before we go on to other massage strokes. It is just a nice warming soothing stroke or gliding stroke, gentle but firm pressure so you are applying a little bit of pressure, not too light. You are moving the skin and some of the muscle, just giving a little bit of pressure to our stroke and stroking out again and bring your hands right up at the top of the calf and rest them before you move on to the next stroke."