That's what I call a good start - all your apprehensions vanished, you can easily do techniques which are often not so easy to do in the beginning, like the Chi Machine, and your partner loves what you are doing. Some people are more natural than others when it comes to massage, and you seem to fall into the first category.

Yes, you are doing it exactly right. 

No, I don't find that others find the leg warm up techniques not as relaxing. They should feel good and relaxing. You provided the answer yourself already when you said you might be a bit heavy handed. But don't be hard on yourself since you are starting this course. 

You will hear a lot about quality of touch in this training. The secret is to keep your hands and wrists relaxed and focus on a feeling of softness. Just imagine your are massaging a baby or a little kitten, and then try to feel how you would touch those fragile little creatures. Now transfer this feeling to your touch when working on an adult. 

You can always work harder and stronger. That's easy. However working gently and softly with a lot of sensitivity is much more difficult. When doing massage you have to develop a feeling of sensuality in your hands. I am not talking about the sexual variety, but about the kind of loving touch you would use on someone who is very dear to you. This might be a spouse or a child or a pet.

What I suggest for you is to focus a lot on working gently, on developing a softness of touch, and on developing sensitivity in your hands. Once you get better at that, you can always add the power to it. That will be easy. There is a good reason why what you are learning is called "a healing art". It is an art, and not just a technique.

The other thing which is almost always a major factor if your touch does not feel good, is that you are working with muscle power instead of with body weight. Using muscle power never feels very good. The secret is to always work with body weight and not with your muscles. This is a mistake which even experienced massage therapist are making frequently. You will hear a lot about that in this course as well.

All this will come with practice. You will see that I talk a lot about all this throughout the training, so you will have lots of help.  The beginning is always the most difficult phase of Thai Massage training. Later it will get easier and feel more natural.

I know that life can get in the way of a practice routine. Luckily this course will always be available for you and I am not going anywhere either.

The leg work is probably the most challenging section of the course, and since it is in the beginning of the course, it appears more difficult anyway. However once you get more into the later sections of the course, it will all feel more natural and easy. Many of my students have experienced this. The beginning can feel like a struggle, and in the end it will feel like it all flows.

Watching the videos several times is absolutely essential. I can guarantee that nobody will succeed with this course just by watching the videos one time only.

It sounds like you have a neat system in place now with your notes and your names as memory joggers. 

Dogs are great receivers for massage. Did you ever read this article I wrote about this subject?

https://thaihealingmassage.com.....of-client/

It's quite normal that in the beginning of the training it all feels kind of wobbly and strange, but as you are experiencing, after a while it sinks in and starts to feel more natural. It's like learning to drive a stick shift car. In the beginning it feels like a bucking bronco, and then later it just becomes part of you.

As long as you keep practicing and re-watching the videos you will keep improving. If you don't watch the videos several times, you will forget things and not catch other things. Regular practice is the simple secret.

If it feels good to you and your partner, then you are on the right track.

Going through the entire course again is an excellent strategy. So many of my students have told me that every time they re-watch a video they pick up something new which they had missed the first time around.

I know from my own experience that Thai Massage can be addictive. It is so immensely useful and practical and easy to do without the need for a massage table, oil, sheets, undressing...

Personally I started my massage career with Thai Massage and I just expanded this more and more. The trick is to not just stay at a certain level but get better and more specialized as time goes on, and you will be in a league of your own with hardly any competition. You will have a fulfilling and satisfying business and a good income.

The perfect touch will be different for different clients or partners. Some need a velvet touch and some like it really strong. The art is to find the artistic flow, as you said, and then match it to what works for a particular client.

I am always stressing this in my courses since one of my most dreaded experiences is the one-size-fits-all massage which unfortunately is done quite a bit here in Thailand.  

Well, the positioning can make or break a technique. However it's just one element of the "anatomy of a massage move" which I talk about throughout this course. Those are the ingredients which make Thai Massage feel good and that distinguish it from a mechanical repetition of the techniques.

I think that using a strap would feel quite awkward for the client. I know that for this technique your hand has a tendency to slip. If your hand is strong and the bones at the base of the toes on the inside and outside of the foot are pronounced, then you can maintain a good grip. If the bones are not pronounced it is easy to slip off. 

When I find that I don't get a good grip on the foot for whatever reason, I just skip this technique and use the one where you hook the client's foot under your leg (shown shortly after this one in the video). For this one you hardly need a hand grip at all. 

Another alternative, especially when you work on large people with heavy legs, is to skip this technique and instead do foot walking or foot rocking on the hamstrings once you get to the prone position in your session. That doesn't require your hands at all.

The technique from module 7 should not require any muscle power. You keep your arms straight and just lean back with your body weight. In order to get a good grip on your partner's thigh, you should squeeze your hands together, kind of generating a gentle vise grip on the thigh. If you slip off the leg, then make the angle of your partner's thigh steeper by moving her foot closer to her buttocks. The steeper the angle, the better leverage you get on the thigh.

It's quite normal that not everybody can handle every stretch well, or that one stretch works better for someone than another. That's why I always say that the techniques are not meant to be a fixed sequence but they are options to choose from. The art is to figure out what works best on which client, and that only comes with lots of practice.