Chize

What is LU5 (Chize), and why do people press it?

LU5, called Chize ("Cubit Marsh"), is the fifth point of the Lung channel and sits right in the crease of your elbow, on the thumb side of the big tendon you can feel in the middle. In classical Chinese medicine it is the He-Sea point of the Lung channel and its Water point — the place where the channel's energy is said to gather and pool like water settling into a marsh, which is exactly what the name describes. Because of that "watery, downward, cooling" character, tradition assigns it to hot, dry, tight, upward-rebelling lung patterns: a barking or hacking cough, a chest that feels tight and hot, wheezing, a scratchy dry throat, and a sense that the breath will not come all the way down.

Modern acupressure keeps two practical uses for it. The first is respiratory: people use LU5 alongside breathing exercises during a lingering cough, seasonal chest tightness, or the tail end of a cold when the cough hangs on after everything else has cleared. The second is entirely musculoskeletal: LU5 sits on the front of the elbow near the tendon and muscle attachments, so it is one of the standard local points for elbow pain, forearm tension, and the ache that builds up in people who grip, lift, type, or throw. Traditional texts also mention it for tightness or spasm that runs from the elbow up the front of the arm toward the shoulder.

What LU5 is not: it is not a treatment for asthma, pneumonia, COVID, or any other lung disease, and it is not a substitute for an inhaler, an antibiotic, or emergency care. Someone with diagnosed asthma keeps using their prescribed reliever exactly as directed; pressing an elbow point is at most a comfort measure layered on top. The honest summary is that this is a tradition-strong, trial-weak point — deeply established in the classical record and in daily clinical use, with human trial evidence that is thin, small, and usually bundled with other points so LU5's own contribution cannot be separated out. It is pleasant, low-risk, easy to reach on yourself, and worth knowing — as long as you hold expectations at the right size.

How do I find LU5 on my own elbow?

LU5 is one of the easiest points to locate because it sits on a crease you can see, next to a tendon you can feel. Work on the arm you are not using to press — sit down, rest your forearm palm-up on a table or on your thigh.

• Bend the elbow slightly — about 20 to 45 degrees, not locked straight and not folded tight. A slight bend makes the elbow crease appear clearly and softens the tissue so you can feel underneath it.
• Find the transverse cubital crease — the horizontal line (sometimes two or three lines) that forms across the front of the elbow when you bend it. LU5 lives on this crease, not above or below it.
• Locate the biceps tendon — the thick cord running down the middle of the elbow crease. To make it pop out, turn your palm up and try to bend the elbow against light resistance from your other hand for a second or two. The cord that stands up under the skin in the centre of the crease is the tendon of the biceps.
• Slide to the thumb side — move your fingertip off the tendon toward the radial side, meaning the outer or thumb side of the forearm. You will drop into a soft hollow immediately beside the cord.
• That hollow is LU5. It usually feels slightly spongy, and in most people it is a touch tender or "zingy" compared with the tissue a centimetre either side. If you press directly on the hard cord itself, you have gone too far toward the middle — slide out a bit.
• Cross-check with the pinky side: a mirror-image hollow on the little-finger side of the same tendon is a different point (HT3), used for other things. LU5 is always the thumb-side hollow.
• Cross-check downstream: LU5 is at the top of the same line that runs down the thumb side of the forearm to LU9 at the wrist crease beside the radial pulse. If you draw an imaginary line from the pulse point straight up the thumb-side edge of the forearm to the elbow crease, LU5 is where it lands.
• Avoid the pulse and the pit: the brachial artery pulse is felt toward the middle-to-inner side of the crease. If you feel a strong beat under your finger, you are too central — move outward toward the thumb.

Both arms have an LU5. For a cough, most people work both sides; for elbow pain, work the sore side and often the other side too.

How do I actually press LU5?

1. Set up comfortably. Sit with your forearm supported, palm facing up, elbow bent slightly. Warm hands work better than cold ones — rub your palms together first if needed.
2. Place your thumb. Reach across with the opposite hand and lay the pad of your thumb (not the nail, not the tip) into the hollow on the thumb side of the biceps tendon. Let your other fingers curl behind the elbow to give you something to squeeze against — you are essentially pinching the elbow gently between thumb in front and fingers behind.
3. Sink slowly. Press straight in, perpendicular to the skin, taking about five seconds to reach working depth. Never jab. The tissue here is soft and there are vessels and nerves in the neighbourhood, so slow and broad beats fast and pointed.
4. Find the right pressure. Aim for a firm, dull, spreading ache — sometimes described as a mild soreness or heaviness that may travel a little down the forearm. On a 0–10 scale, work at 3 to 5. Sharp, electric, burning, or shooting sensations are a signal to ease off immediately and reposition slightly.
5. Hold and breathe. Maintain steady pressure for 30 to 60 seconds while breathing slowly out through the mouth with the exhale longer than the inhale. For cough and chest tightness, the breathing is not filler — the slow exhale is doing at least as much work as the thumb.
6. Add small circles if you like. Alternatively, make slow circular movements about the width of a pea, roughly one circle per second, keeping the skin moving with your thumb rather than sliding over it.
7. Release slowly over a few seconds, rest for 10 to 15 seconds, then repeat for a total of 2 to 4 rounds.
8. Switch arms and repeat the same sequence on the other side.
9. For elbow pain, finish by taking the elbow gently through its full comfortable bend-and-straighten range a few times, and turn the palm up and down slowly. Pressure plus movement generally beats pressure alone for a joint complaint.
10. Frequency. Two or three sessions a day is plenty during a flare of coughing or elbow soreness. Sessions of two to five minutes per arm are the usual working range; more is not better, and heavy repeated pressure on the same spot can leave the area bruised and sore.

Stop the session if you feel light-headed, if numbness or tingling appears in the hand, or if the elbow itself becomes more painful during the pressure rather than less.

What do people use LU5 for?

1. Lingering dry or hacking cough. This is the classical headline use. As the Water point of the Lung channel, LU5 is the traditional choice for a cough that feels hot, dry, tickly and unproductive — the kind that hangs on for a week or two after a cold has otherwise resolved. Users typically report a short-term easing of the urge to cough and a less scratchy throat rather than any elimination of the cough itself.
2. Chest tightness and wheezy breathing. Tradition pairs LU5 with breathing work for a chest that feels constricted and for breath that seems to stop high in the chest. Used honestly, this is a comfort and self-regulation practice that sits alongside — never instead of — prescribed asthma medication, inhalers and action plans.
3. Elbow pain and tendon soreness. LU5 is a genuine local point for the front of the elbow. People with gripping, lifting, racket-sport or keyboard-related elbow ache use it to soften the tissue around the biceps tendon attachment and the surrounding forearm muscles.
4. Forearm tightness and heaviness. Because the Lung channel runs from the chest down the thumb side of the arm, pressure at LU5 is used to release the whole forearm line — helpful for people who clench a mouse, a steering wheel or a tool all day.
5. Sore, dry throat. Often combined with cough work, on the traditional logic that LU5 cools and moistens a dry Lung.
6. Post-exercise or post-cold recovery routines. Many people simply fold it into a general arm-and-chest self-massage, alongside LU1 near the shoulder and LU9 at the wrist.
7. A pause point during breathlessness from anxiety. Holding LU5 while lengthening the exhale gives an anxious breather something concrete to do with their hands and attention. The value here is plausibly the slow breathing and the grounding, not anything unique to the elbow.

Across all of these, the appropriate claim is symptom comfort, sometimes, for some people, for a while. LU5 does not cure a cough, does not treat asthma, does not repair a tendon, and should never delay a proper assessment of breathing trouble or a painful elbow that is not improving.

Can LU5 be used preventively, and what can it realistically head off?

Preventive claims deserve even more caution than treatment claims, because nobody can measure the cold you did not catch. Here is the honest version of how LU5 fits into a preventive routine.

• It may help prevent elbow overuse from building up. This is the most defensible preventive use. Brief daily pressure and mobility work at the elbow — LU5 plus gentle bend-and-straighten and palm rotations — keeps you noticing tension early, before a grumbling forearm turns into a full-blown painful elbow. The mechanism here is unremarkable and sensible: attention, circulation, and movement.
• It can anchor a daily slow-breathing habit. Pairing LU5 pressure with a two-minute extended-exhale practice gives the habit a physical cue. Regular slow breathing is a reasonable general wellbeing practice; LU5 is the ritual around it, not the active ingredient.
• It may reduce how much a dry cough escalates. Some people find that pressing early, at the first tickle, plus deliberate slow nasal breathing, keeps them from spiralling into a coughing fit. This is a plausible comfort effect and nothing more.
• It will not prevent respiratory infections. There is no credible basis for claiming acupressure prevents colds, flu, COVID or pneumonia. Vaccination where indicated, hand hygiene, sleep and ventilation are the tools that actually do that work.
• It will not prevent asthma attacks. Attack prevention comes from controller medication, trigger management and a written asthma action plan agreed with a clinician. Nothing described on this page changes that.
• It will not prevent tendon injury on its own. Load management, gradual strength building, technique changes and rest do that. LU5 is a comfort adjunct within that plan.

A reasonable preventive routine looks like this: once daily, 60 to 90 seconds per elbow, ideally at the end of a work block or before bed, combined with slow breathing and a few gentle elbow and wrist movements. If you notice the point is consistently very tender on one side only, treat that as information about your arm's workload rather than as a diagnosis, and adjust what you are doing with that arm.

What makes LU5 work better in practice?

• Let the tendon guide you every time. Do not memorise a spot on your skin — re-find the biceps tendon at the start of each session. The elbow crease shifts with arm position, and the tendon is the reliable landmark.
• Slight bend, always. A locked-straight elbow tightens the tissue and hides the hollow; a fully folded elbow buries it. Twenty to forty-five degrees is the sweet spot.
• Breathe out longer than you breathe in. For anything cough- or chest-related, make the exhale roughly twice the inhale, through slightly pursed lips. If you do only one thing from this page, do this.
• Use the pad, not the point. A broad thumb pad distributes pressure and is far more comfortable than a fingertip or a nail. Keep nails short.
• Anchor with the other fingers. Curling your fingers behind the elbow turns the movement into a controlled squeeze, which is easier to hold steady than an unsupported push.
• Warm the area first. A warm shower, a heat pack for a few minutes, or brisk rubbing of the forearm makes the tissue more responsive — especially for elbow complaints.
• Pair it sensibly. Traditional combinations for cough add LU1 below the outer collarbone and LU9 at the wrist crease; for elbow pain, people add LI11 at the outer end of the elbow crease. Keep the whole session under about ten minutes.
• Do both arms. Even for one-sided elbow pain, working the unaffected side is comfortable and gives you a useful comparison for tenderness.
• Track it. Note cough frequency or elbow pain out of ten before and after for a week. If nothing shifts at all over two weeks of honest trying, this point is probably not your tool — that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
• Hydrate and humidify. For a dry cough, a humid room and adequate fluids do more measurable good than any point. Use LU5 as the ritual around good basics, not as a replacement for them.
• Keep it inside your medical plan. Tell your clinician you are doing this. It is harmless information, and it keeps everyone honest about what is helping.

What do people get wrong with LU5?

• Pressing on the tendon instead of beside it. The single most common error. If your thumb is on a firm cord, slide toward the thumb side until you drop into the soft hollow. Pressing the cord itself is uncomfortable and misses the point.
• Going too far toward the inner elbow. Move too far the other way and you are over the brachial artery and the median nerve territory. If you feel a pulse thumping under your finger or get pins and needles into the hand, you are in the wrong place — release and reposition outward.
• Using far too much force. The front of the elbow is soft tissue, not a slab of muscle. Digging in hard bruises the area and can leave it sore for days without adding any benefit. Firm and dull, not sharp and brutal.
• Pressing with a locked, straight arm. The hollow vanishes and you end up mashing tendon. Bend slightly first.
• Holding your breath while pressing. Very common and completely counterproductive for a respiratory point. If you catch yourself bracing, restart with three slow exhales before you apply any pressure.
• Skipping the inhaler or the controller medication. The most dangerous mistake on this page. Nothing here replaces prescribed asthma or COPD treatment, antibiotics, or emergency care. Acupressure is layered on top, never swapped in.
• Treating an undiagnosed cough for weeks. A cough lasting more than three weeks, or one with blood, fever, weight loss, night sweats or increasing breathlessness, needs a clinician — not more elbow pressure.
• Working through sharp elbow pain. If pressure at the elbow produces sharp, shooting or electric pain, if the joint is hot, swollen, red or locked, or if you cannot straighten it after an injury, stop and get it looked at.
• Expecting a cure. People who go in expecting the cough to vanish are disappointed and then dismiss the whole practice. Expect modest, temporary comfort; judge it on that.
• Doing it too long, too often. Ten hard minutes per arm, five times a day, produces a sore elbow. Two to five minutes, two or three times daily, is the sensible dose.

What does the human research actually show for LU5?

Very little that is specific to this point, and it is important to say so plainly. The bulk of published acupoint research uses needling rather than finger pressure, uses multi-point protocols in which LU5 is one of six or eight points, and reports subjective outcomes such as cough scores, symptom diaries or pain ratings. When LU5 appears at all, it appears inside a bundle — so even in a study reporting a positive result, there is no way to know whether LU5 contributed anything, or whether the effect came from another point, from the practitioner's attention, from the relaxation and slow breathing built into the session, or from the natural course of a self-limiting illness. Acupressure trials in particular are extremely difficult to blind: participants know whether firm pressure is being applied, and expectation reliably moves symptom scores for cough, breathlessness and pain — three of the most placebo-responsive outcomes in medicine.

For the respiratory uses, respiratory guidelines in mainstream practice do not include acupressure as a recommended treatment for asthma, bronchitis or chronic cough, and reviews of the area consistently describe the trial base as small, heterogeneous and at high risk of bias. For the elbow uses, the picture is a little more ordinary: local pressure and massage around a sore, overused joint have modest short-term evidence for comfort and stiffness in general musculoskeletal care, but that evidence attaches to soft-tissue work broadly, not to LU5 as a named acupuncture point.

What LU5 does have is a long and unbroken traditional record. It is a He-Sea point, one of the most classically important categories of point, named and described in the foundational texts of Chinese medicine and taught in essentially every acupuncture curriculum in the world today. It has been used continuously for cough, chest heat and elbow tension for roughly two thousand years. That is real standing — but it is standing in a tradition, not evidence from controlled human trials, and the two should never be blurred together. The practical conclusion for a reader: LU5 is safe, free, easy to reach and worth a fair trial for cough comfort or a sore elbow, provided you keep it firmly alongside proper medical care and judge it honestly after a couple of weeks.