When you’re looking to get massage and bodywork for pain management or recovery, there can be an awful lot of options out there. Everything from Swedish to orthopedic, sports massage to hot stone massage, Thai to Shiatsu.

When booking a massage, you can easily see this when perusing list of services at an ordinary spa or clinic. Frankly, most spas have service lists that are as large as a menu at the Cheesecake Factory. This has always annoyed me for a couple of reasons:

  1. First, it makes it difficult to understand exactly what you need. If you aren’t a massage professional, it can be exceedingly difficult to determine what particular service fits your needs and goals.
  2. Second, the services are usually priced completely differently. For example, a Swedish massage might cost more than a deep tissue massage…which might cots less than a Thai massage.

As a practitioner, this always irked me. I mean, if I’m giving a Swedish massage, and my Deep Tissue Massage costs more money, then at what point do I determine when the pressure is enough to consider it a Deep Tissue Massage? Furthermore, if somebody wants more pressure but only paid for a Swedish massage, then what do I do?

Do I interrupt the session and upsell the client for the higher priced offering? Do I ask for more money when they are checking out after the session?

This always seemed odd to me. Is a client paying for pressure levels and techniques, or are they paying for the outcome they desire relative to their goals and needs?

We think a bit differently at Brooklyn Body Mechanic. My philosophy has always been that you are paying a therapist for their time and expertise…specifically their TIME.

So what modalities do we give you when you come in for a massage here?

Well, we give you what you want. When you come in to see us, you have specific needs based on whatever specific complaint you have at the time. This means that we need to devise a custom treatment to get you to your goals in the most effective and comfotable way possible. Protocols can be a good guide, particularly for beginner therapists, but we’re not big on cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solutions.

Things are binary like that. There’s always more than one way to tackle a program.

All of us here are trained in a variety of modalites such as Swedish, Tui Na, and Shiatsu. We don’t sell those seperartely, but rather we integrate them into your session based on what you want to accomplish in the time you have.

Some of us are better at some modalities than others and we choose the techniques that best fit our expertise.

Personally, I do a lot of DermoNeuroModulating work, Triggerpoint therapy, and Myofascial Release. However, I don’t lock myself into specific paradigms when working on a client. My staff does not do this, either.

What we use depends on what you need or want, not what some particular menu says at a spa. We do this because we honestly feel that by locking into a particular modality or protocol, it does a client a disservice. A classic example of this (and one of my biggests pet peeves as a massage educator) would be a typical Swedish massage that is generally offered at spas. Most therapists revert to performing a standard 60-minute protocol, as opposed to targeting specific areas.

I understand that this has its uses. Really, I do. There is certainly merit to downregulation of the Central Nervous System and relaxation massage is absolutely wonderful.

But…

If you have a specific problem, you need a specific treatment. Period.

So, which massage should you get? Well, we’ll figure that out when you come in to see us and we have review your intake and discussed long and short term goals.

Because this is the way we operate, you’ll notive that If you look at our booking page, you there isn’t a huge menu: You simply pay for our time. 60, 90, or 120 minutes. This is the way we believe it should be.

Why confuse you with a million different selections, only to find out once you’re on the table that this isn’t what you had in mind to begin with or that it’s simply not working for you. By stressing our time and by being committed to complete clear communication, we are able to customize things on the fly for you as your situation changes on the table…or if you simply don’t like what’s going on with the session and want techniques that feel better to you.

Compare that with other places where you have to be locked into a specific modality…it just doesn’t put you into the driver’s seat. If make you a passive participant rather than putting YOU in control.

So, yeah, if you were expecting a complete breakdown of every single different modality and why you should and shouldn’t do it, you’re not going to find that here. What you’ll find is simple: You pay for our time and we give you whatever you need.