How to Tell Your Therapist What You Need

A massage therapist is skilled, not psychic. The difference between an adequate session and one you talk about for a week is almost always information, and almost all of that information has to come from you.

Start at intake with location and history rather than a modality. "My right shoulder has been tight since March and it is worse by the end of a workday" tells a therapist far more than "I want deep tissue." Include what makes it worse, what you have already tried, and whether anything is off limits. If a doctor has looked at it, say what they said. Thirty seconds of this shapes the whole hour.

Then the pressure conversation. The instruction to avoid is "go as hard as you can." It sounds cooperative and it is actually a handicap, because it removes the therapist's ability to calibrate and it turns the session into a tolerance test. What works better is describing a target sensation. "I want to feel it working but I want to be able to breathe normally" is a genuinely useful sentence. So is "I like it right at the edge of uncomfortable" and so is "I bruise easily, please stay moderate."

A one to ten scale helps if you like numbers, as long as you define the top honestly. Ten is not a badge. Say something like "keep me around a seven and check with me before you go past it," and you have given your therapist a working instruction.

During the session, four short phrases will handle almost everything. "A little deeper there." "That is too much." "Can you stay on that spot." "Move on from that one." None of these are rude, none of them will offend anyone, and all of them are more useful than lying still and hoping. Therapists here would far rather be corrected in the moment than told at the counter that the pressure was wrong the entire time.

Say something immediately for anything sharp, electric, tingling, or radiating down a limb. That category is not something to breathe through and not something to be polite about.

There are also non-pressure things worth voicing. If face-down is uncomfortable for your neck, say so and you can be repositioned. If the room is cold, say so. If you would rather not talk, say "I'm going to be quiet, nothing is wrong," and any therapist will read that correctly. If you would rather a certain area was skipped entirely, name it at the start and it will be skipped, no reason required.

Preference about your therapist belongs at the booking stage rather than the door. We staff both male and female licensed therapists specifically so that request can be met, and you never have to explain it.

At the end, one question is worth asking every time: what did you find? A good therapist will tell you what was tight, what was surprisingly tight, what they think is driving it, and what they would do differently next time. Write it down. That is the map for your next session, and it is the difference between six unrelated massages and a sequence that actually gets somewhere.