Tight muscles in the neck are the cause most of our headaches. To head off tension before it starts, try these three tips for giving a great neck massage.  These are not intuitive, so you are about to learn a lot right now.

Tip # 1: Have the recipient lie on their back (instead of sitting up)
The number one mistake every non-massage therapist makes is to have the recipient seated when working on their neck. This is wrong, because the neck muscles are actively doing work holding up your 8 lb head. It is the equivalent of asking someone to tense up a muscle as much as possible before massaging it. This constant demand on the muscles is the reason that they are tense in the first place.

Lying down, on the other hand, enables the neck muscles to be relaxed, which in turn makes the massage 10 times more effective. Imagine if you were trying to massage a muscle, and you asked the recipient to tense up as much as possible before starting. That’s exactly what you’re doing if you attempt to massage people’s necks while they sit up.

To avoid this problem, you want the recipient lying down, either on a bed with you behind them in a chair, or on the floor, with you seated behind their head, legs straddling them. One tip: You can use a pillow placed under the recipients upper back to force their head to lean backwards, which mimics the natural curvature of the cervical spine when standing (but without the musclular tension). For more on this, and how to sleep, read this.

Tip # 2: Make certain to relax the recipient.
You should be seated at the head of the recipient, with your legs on either side of their body. The neck muscles are very hard to relax, for two reasons. First, they are tense all day. It’s hard to transcend that. Second, it is really up in our personal space to have someone touching and moving your head around. Unless the recipient is a devout Yoga student, they will have problems relaxing. And that is from professional experience after someone already has been massaged for 30 minutes before I get to their neck - this is even harder at home.

The best way to create a state of relaxation is to cradle the recipients head in your palms, with your fingers pointing toward their bodies, and to lift their head up slightly off the ground. Often, they use the muscles in the front of their neck and hold up the weight of their heads themselves. Be patient, and lift and lower their head until the recipient ceases to help you and you are holding the whole weight of their head in your hand, and they are no longer “helping” you lift the head.

If this is a problem, you can lift their head up a little, then drop it. Until they relax, their head will stay in the air where you let it go. You can then remind them that if they were relaxed, their head would have fallen back down. Naturally, don’t do this step on a hardwood floor. I usually told people “I know your head weighs more than this”, which appeals more to their left hemisphere than their state of relaxation, which is hard to fix instantly. Besides working around someone being ticklish, this is on of the few times you have to work to get them relaxed.

Tip # 3: Apply pressure upwards.
I am only going to cover the ways of massaging someone that you would not intuitively guess on your own. So, experiment happily, all of the time.

From your position behind their head, keep the backs of your hands on the floor, and push your fingers upwards right where the neck enters the head. Let the weight of the head pressing back against your hand make everything happen. While they are relaxed, go ahead and massage behind their neck, still applying pressure upwards, while caradling the weight of their heads in your palms. This is very soothing, and doesn’t use your thumbs. This done by a trained professional is called Cranio Sacral Therapy. 

Once you have a good understanding of where the muscles on either side of the spine are, you can pinch them lightly with your index finger and thumb. There are two ways of doing this. First, by grabbing the entire back of the neck, and squeezing the muscles on either side with your thumbs on one side, and your fingers on the other. The other way is by only massaging on one side of the spine, by picking up the muscle with your index finger and thumb, and rubbing it like you would money in your hands. When doing this, you are pinching a muscle that is about the size of a finger, which run paralell by the spine. Massage different parts of it up and down the muscle.

Put these three tips into practice and you’ll give a neck massage so good the recipient will want to return the favor. Use these tips tonight, and share your experiences in the comments below!