Massage clients want to hear how “tight” they are

Hard, ropey muscle texture is not as useful a sign in massage therapy as you might think. Of course it matters sometimes, but it’s almost comically overemphasized. “You’re really tight” is mostly meaningless and misleading, a simplistic justification for the service: you are tight, therefore you need me to loosen you.

But someone wisely pointed out to me that this emphasis on tightness isn’t all coming from massage therapists! Patients really like to have their subjective experience validated. They ask for it. They may even prompt for it strongly. Asking “Is that as tight as I think it is?” is really on the nose — but I’ve heard it! And many subtler variations.

People feel tight, and so they enjoy and seek out this “objective” confirmation of what they feel. At its best, this tightness-validating teamwork is a partial antidote to the way pain is (weirdly) often not taken seriously by healthcare professionals.

However, people can be respected and validated in other ways. It’s probably best not to try to spackle over a real problem with a fanciful or overly simplistic story about its nature (that just happens to be part of a sales pitch for more therapy). “Validation” is lovely, but it’s not actually an excuse for making anything up.

After getting the feedback, I wrote this up for a minor update to my full article about the obsession with “tightness” in massage.