Nervous hands are usually too intense or jerky. Initially, your massage practice should not be so much about techniques, but about being aware of your pressure, tempo and hand-to-body contact. The body likes to be touched with evenness. So a good practice stroke is to put both hands on your partner’s or model’s back and slowly stroke down towards the pelvis. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you go, just try to do it in an even way. Notice how the skin rolls and how the pressure varies as you contract your wrist. As you get smoother, you lay the foundation for all future techniques.
Practice one stroke at a time. The most common pressure mistake is to use the fingers instead of bodyweight. Your fingers will quickly fatigue and your pressure will be pointy rather than smooth. Instead, keep your arms fairly relaxed and lean forward a bit at the hips to apply pressure. Let your big weight-bearing muscles guide your pressure for you. As you practice, notice your breathing. If your shoulders rise and your breathing gets shallow, you are tensing up in your hands.
If you drop your shoulders and take a slow exhalation, you will probably relax again. Tempo is just as important as pressure. If your strokes change tempo for no reason, the receiver can get distracted. To learn tempo, practice long strokes that take about five seconds to execute. As you stroke down the back, slowly count to yourself. One-thousand one, one-thousand two, etc. It might seem hokey to you now, but this trains your hands to move in a steady tempo. Once you get going, practice the stroke several times in a row and then drop the counting and try to maintain the tempo.
After a while, you will internalize that tempo and your transitions between strokes will begin to smooth out. A little practice each day is better than one long practice session each week. If you do just one fifteen minute session per day, you are well ahead of someone who does one two-hour session per week. In that fifteen minutes, practice the following. First, spend a few minutes just making palm-to-skin contact with your partner’s back. This warms up the tissue and helps you learn pressure. Then, spend a few minutes practicing long strokes from the shoulder down to the hips. Concentrate on tempo.
Finally, practice using your forearms and applying a bit more pressure. As long as you keep your movements under control, that’s okay. This little sequence gives you some practice with all the fundamentals of touch, body mechanics and tempo without overwhelming your hands with too many new techniques. Sometimes, you will hit a plateau where your strokes start to feel mechanical and stiff. When this happens, stop and observe instead of trying to push through.
Place one hand on your receiver’s back and just follow the contours of the musculature with light pressure. Often, a simple quiet moment like this will help you recognize some small change you need to make to feel more comfortable and be in more control. With practice, your hands get more sensitive, and the stuff that used to feel clumsy to you will start to feel smooth and confident.