Maybe You Don’t Need Another Massage

By Bode Bamkole

I love a good massage.

Let’s establish that before I annoy half the recovery industry.

Massage can feel great. It can help with recovery, relaxation and temporary relief from soreness or stiffness. We work with recovery technology at Ogo, so I’m certainly not about to argue that people should stop getting massages.

But there is a pattern I keep seeing.

Something hurts.

You get a massage.

It feels better.

A few weeks later, the same thing hurts.

So you get another massage.

And eventually you’ve spent months — sometimes years — repeatedly getting relief from a problem you’ve never actually investigated.

At some point, it’s worth asking:

Why does this keep coming back?

Relief and rehabilitation aren’t the same thing

This is probably the most important distinction.

Sometimes you want relief.

You’ve trained hard. You’ve had a long week. Your body feels beaten up. You want someone — or increasingly, something — to work on your muscles.

Great.

That’s a perfectly legitimate reason to get a massage.

But if you’re repeatedly experiencing pain, restricted movement or a problem that keeps returning, you may need something different.

You may need an assessment.

That’s where a good physiotherapist can become incredibly useful.

Physiotherapy isn’t simply someone giving you a more expensive massage.

A physiotherapist can assess your movement, strength and balance, consider your symptoms and lifestyle, and then build a treatment plan around what they find.

That treatment might include manual therapy.

It might include massage.

But it can also include strengthening, mobility work, movement retraining and exercises that you continue between appointments.

And unfortunately, that last part is often the bit nobody wants to hear.

The annoying thing about physio is that you have to do the work

I’ve seen this in my own rehab.

There are problems I used to think of as things I simply had to live with.

Tightness.

Pain.

Movement limitations.

Coordination issues.

Things that would temporarily feel better after someone worked on them.

But some of those problems weren’t solved by finding a better way to relieve them.

They changed because I actually did the work.

Assess the problem.

Understand what needs improving.

Do the exercises.

Get stronger.

Improve the movement.

Come back.

Reassess.

Repeat.

It’s much less appealing than lying on a table for an hour.

But when it works, something interesting happens:

You stop needing as much relief.

How much are you spending managing the same problem?

This is the financial part people don’t always think about.

Imagine you’re paying for a massage every few weeks because your back, neck, shoulder or hips constantly feel uncomfortable.

One session doesn’t sound particularly expensive.

But repeat that over a year.

Then add massage guns.

Heat packs.

Recovery equipment.

Another treatment.

Another massage.

Another temporary fix.

If the underlying issue is something that can be improved through appropriate rehabilitation, there is another possibility:

You spend some of that money getting assessed.

You get a programme.

You actually follow it.

And over time, perhaps you don’t need somebody to make the same area feel better every few weeks.

That’s not guaranteed. Pain is complicated, and there are many reasons somebody might experience it.

But if something keeps coming back, surely it’s worth finding out why.

This is especially relevant if you work at a desk

A lot of the people we speak to through Ogo spend huge amounts of their working lives sitting down.

Then eventually something starts feeling tight or uncomfortable.

Neck.

Shoulders.

Back.

Hips.

And the immediate instinct is:

I need someone to loosen this up.

Maybe.

But you also have to look at what happens during the other 167 hours of the week.

How much are you moving?

How strong are you?

Are you regularly moving your joints through different ranges?

Are you repeatedly sitting in the same positions?

Is there an old injury involved?

Could something else be contributing to the pain?

That’s why we’ve built simple mobility tools for desk workers — not as a replacement for physiotherapy or medical assessment, but to help people put more movement back into their day.

Try the Ogo Mobility Tool →

And if pain is persistent, worsening or affecting normal life, that’s where getting properly assessed becomes much more important.

Where does massage fit?

Massage still has a place.

So do massage guns.

So does recovery technology.

So does robotic massage.

The mistake is expecting every tool to do the same job.

If I want recovery after training, soft-tissue work might be exactly what I want.

If I want to relax, a massage might be perfect.

If a therapist has assessed me and wants to use manual therapy alongside my rehabilitation, great.

And this is actually where technology like robotic massage becomes interesting too.

A physiotherapist or sports therapist doesn’t necessarily need technology to replace their expertise.

Technology can potentially handle some of the repeatable recovery work while the professional focuses on assessment, clinical judgement, rehabilitation and the things that actually require their expertise.

Read: Should I Get a Robotic Massage? →

Different tools. Different jobs.

Don’t just get better at coping with the problem

This is probably the bigger lesson.

We’re very good at buying relief.

And sometimes relief is exactly what we need.

But if you’ve been treating the same painful or restricted area again and again, consider whether you’ve accidentally become very good at managing the symptom without understanding the problem.

Get the massage when you want the massage.

Use recovery tools when you need recovery.

Move regularly.

But when something keeps hurting, keeps limiting you or keeps coming back:

Get it assessed.

You might discover that the best recovery tool isn’t another treatment.

It might be finally doing the work that means you need less treatment in the first place.