Rivals Rub Shoulders in the World of Competitive Massage

Massage has always been part of folk medicine, and it occurred in ancient China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, often in bathhouses. Hippocrates wrote that the physician must be adept at many things, but “assuredly in rubbing”; the eleventh-century Arab philosopher Avicenna wrote about the “friction of preparation” before exercise and the “friction of restoration” after it. But it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century, when the Swedish educator Per Henrik Ling collected, codified, and published exercise and massage techniques from several world traditions, that the art as we know it was born. In 1813, Ling opened the Royal Central Gymnastics Institute, in Stockholm, which also pioneered calisthenics. After Ling’s death, a Dutch student of Swedish medical gymnastics, Johann Georg Mezger, gave massage moves the French names that are still used today—effleurage (stroking), petrissage (kneading), tapotement (tapping), and so on. “Swedish massage” refers to the use of these techniques, though most of the world, including Sweden, calls it “classical massage.” To some, especially in North America, “Swedish” has come to be used as shorthand for a light, relaxing massage (or, derisively in the biz, a “fluff and buff”), in contrast with a more intensive kind, commonly called “deep tissue”—an overly broad and occasionally misleading term that can include many forms of neuromuscular therapy and therapeutic massage, and which may or may not involve firm pressure. Many clients don’t necessarily know the difference, or to what extent massage should cause pain en route to alleviating pain. Tengbjerg, while philosophizing about what clients want and need, had told the group, “When you work the superficial tissue, you can go pretty fast warming up. But the deeper you go the slower you should go. It’s like falling into the ocean—you sink, you sink, and when you’re at the bottom you cannot do things fast.”

In the United States, massage wasn’t regulated for a long time, and has been used as a cover for sex work; even today, jokes about happy endings persist, something that rankles therapists. So do the terms “massage parlor,” “masseuse,” and “masseur,” which are longtime euphemisms, though laypeople can use them unwittingly. “Phoebe, on ‘Friends,’ kind of destroyed it for us in a way, too, because she called herself a masseuse,” Hoyme told me. “In America, we don’t use that term, because it’s considered a female prostitute.”

But massage has become more mainstream in North America—the realm of the strip mall, where affordable massage franchises have proliferated (Massage Envy, the biggest, has nearly a thousand locations and offers a subscription option), and a pillar of the fitness and wellness industries. (Many insurers cover massage for rehabilitation purposes.) Though new massage therapists can struggle to make ends meet—franchises generally don’t pay well—they are in high demand. “There’s a huge shortage of massage therapists,” Nordstrom, who’s also the training director for the franchise Hand & Stone, told me. In a recent Microsoft study of jobs most likely to be affected by generative A.I., massage therapist was ranked among the lowest, alongside phlebotomist and undertaker; although Tengbjerg recently gave a lecture called “Massage Robots of the Future,” human touch, for now, seems irreplaceable. The stress of the pandemic, in particular, supercharged the industry. There are more than three hundred thousand licensed massage therapists in the U.S., and a 2src25 A.M.T.A. poll indicated that the majority of them have pursued the work as a second career.

In Copenhagen, quite a few competitors confirmed this. Lito Orbase, from Northern California, showed me some meaningful tattoos: a microphone and a guitar, a koi for good luck, and a phoenix. “Phoenix is for, like, changing careers,” he said. “I was working for A. T. & T., a huge company, so they had all these electives, and one of them was massage therapy.” Orbase loved it, and began practicing on friends. Later, A. T. & T. offered him a severance package—enough money to try massaging professionally. “I’ve been doing it ever since,” he said. He took special courses in fascial-stretch therapy, which was developed to treat the mobility concerns of pro athletes. “So I became a Level 3 stretch therapist, and the Raiders”—the N.F.L. team, then of Oakland—“asked if I wanted to work with them. I did for a year, then they moved to Nevada.” Ivan Llundyk, a Ukrainian former E.M.T. who lives in Poland, told me, “After college, I was working in an ambulance helping people, but I didn’t feel like it was a job for my soul.” He ran a hookah bar for a while, then found happiness in massage, where he believes that he can intuit what a client needs. Gabriel Gargari, an American, left his career as an up-and-coming opera singer after going on a retreat in Ibiza and discovering Ke Ala Hoku, or Pathway to the Stars, a form of the Polynesian slow-massage tradition lomilomi. “We got to learn these ancient principles, and walked the way of how a kahuna would be . . . it just opened up something within me that I didn’t know was even possible,” he told me. Lomilomi involves lots of forearm pressure and uses strokes that traverse the entire length of the body at once. Gargari incorporates music from his clients’ ancestral backgrounds into their massage.

Several of my conversations took place on a walking tour of Copenhagen, early in the conference. People hung out with their countrymen—Team U.S.A. Massage, which Krista Harris started a few years ago to unite the Americans, was especially friendly—and giddily introduced themselves to their competitors. Denmark felt almost comically idyllic. Families and couples strolled around the gorgeous Tivoli Gardens amusement park; parked bikes were left unlocked. (“Everybody already has a bike here,” a local told me.) It was midnight-sun season, when an air of lighthearted jollity reigns, and when open-air trucks full of newly graduated high schoolers, in white sailor-style hats, drive around town, honking and whooping with glee. Locals are sentimental about the happy, drunken teen graduates, who are thanked by strangers for their future contributions to Denmark. Not far from the harbor, young people gathered at CopenHill, a towering Bjarke Ingels-designed waste-to-energy plant, which has a climbing wall on its exterior and a synthetic-grass ski slope down its side. A thirtysomething Danish guy offhandedly told me, “I pay fifty per cent of my income in taxes, and I’d gladly pay more.”