massage

How to think about giving a good massage?

Know which way the muscle fibers go. For deep release, exert force perpendicular to the muscle fiber (either along the plane of the skin, or by pushing hard inwards), which stretches it out. If the muscle is being held in a tense position, this stretching forces it to either break or relax, and reflexively your nerves will prefer to relax it than to risk the break. This technique is called inhibition (?).

Important anatomy:

• paraspinal muscles, on each side of the spinal column going down the back (note the spinal column itself is not covered by muscle)
• trapezius: big diamond-shaped muscle covering the entire back, converging at the bottom on the
• shoulder blade: tons of muscles connect to this. You can stretch (and thus inhibit/relax) them all, together, by gripping the shoulder blade tightly in both hands (have them hold one hand behind their back, which will cause the shoulder blade to emerge more prominently) and moving it like a joystick in a slow circular motion, first clockwise and then counterclockwise.
• butt: can inhibit by just leaning in with a lot of weight on an elbow
• groin: the muscle is kind of a triangle with ?
• calves: each has two muscle 'bellies'; stretch them by pulling those apart.
• vagus nerve: really push in near the base of the skull (I lay down on his hands so it was my head's weight pushing down while in a relaxed position) to generally relax the lower body by stimulating the vagus nerve, which controls the parasympathetic or 'rest-and-digest' part of the autonomic nervous system.