What to do
after a massage

None of this is a protocol, and nothing goes wrong if you ignore all of it. These are simply the six things people at our desk most often wish they'd known an hour earlier. Each one links to the longer version further down.

Getting off the table badly is the most common way to spoil a good session. Sit up on the edge first, let your feet find the floor, and give it fifteen seconds before you stand. Blood pressure does what it does when you've spent an hour horizontal and warm — a lot of people feel briefly light-headed, and all of them feel fine again once they've stopped moving like they're late.

Get dressed slowly. Check you've got your keys and your phone before you leave the room, because your short-term memory is not at its sharpest in the ten minutes after a massage — this is a well-established front-desk observation, not a medical one. There's water at the desk; take a cup.

Then, if you can, don't get straight into the car and onto Hwy 41. Caribou Coffee is 59 feet from our door and Chaska Commons has a perfectly good sidewalk. Ten minutes of sitting or wandering before you drive turns a good hour into a good afternoon. If you're already thinking about the next one, booking on the way out takes about a minute at the desk.

Drink water afterwards. Genuinely, do. But the reason is boring: you've just spent an hour in a warm room, face-down, breathing through a padded cradle, without a sip of anything. You are warm and you are thirsty. That's it. That's the entire mechanism.

It's a good habit for the same reason drinking water after a nap or a sauna is a good habit, and it costs you nothing. What it isn't is a clean-up operation. Nobody needs to drink a litre in the parking lot, and nothing bad happens to you if you don't.

We're labouring the point because the version you've been told is the next section, and it has done a surprising amount of damage to how people understand what an hour on a table actually is.

Massage does not release, flush or drain toxins. There is no toxin. Nobody has ever named the substance, measured it before and after a session, or explained how a pair of hands would move it anywhere in particular.

Your liver and your kidneys handle metabolic waste, continuously, whether or not you have ever been to a spa. That job is not outsourced to a massage therapist for an hour on a Thursday. The neutral, non-commercial sources describe massage in far more modest terms — the NCCIH's overview of massage therapy is a good example of how carefully the honest version reads compared with the spa-brochure version.

Why does it matter, if it's a harmless story? Because it is the front door to worse claims. Once "flushing toxins" is accepted, "detoxifying", "boosting immunity" and "realigning" follow, and then somebody with a real medical problem books a massage instead of an appointment with a doctor. We'd rather sell you an hour that feels good and describe it accurately. The same applies to the marks cupping leaves — they're a sensation and a discolouration, not evidence of anything being drawn out of you.

After deeper or slower work, a lot of people are mildly tender the next day — most often across the upper back, the shoulders, or wherever the therapist spent the longest. It reads like the day after starting a new kind of exercise: achy, a bit heavy, not sharp. For most people it fades within 24 to 48 hours and needs nothing done about it.

Soreness is not a scorecard. A session that leaves you tender was not "better" than one that didn't, and asking for punishing pressure so you can feel it tomorrow is a good way to spend the next two days regretting an hour you enjoyed. If you were tender longer than you liked last time, say so at the start of the next session — that single sentence is the most useful feedback a therapist can get. The NCCIH's practical notes on massage therapy mention temporary discomfort in the same matter-of-fact way.

Yes. You can shower straight after a massage, an hour later or the next morning, and the same goes for a bath. Washing the oil off does not undo the session, and there is no waiting period that does anything for you. The one practical caveat is heat: if you felt light-headed sitting up from the table, let that pass before you stand under very hot water.

You will find advice online to wait one, two or three hours so the oil can "keep working" or so you don't "wash away the benefits". We don't know of any evidence for either. What the oil leaves behind is a light film that some people like on their skin overnight and others want gone before they get into good sheets — a preference, not a protocol. And the idea that a shower rinses off released toxins is the toxin myth from further up this page in a different hat.

For most people a warm shower an hour or two after a session is simply one of the more reliably pleasant things available, and we're not going to dress it up beyond that. If your scalp was worked with oil, it usually takes two rounds of shampoo. The only thing that changes the answer is the kind of session you had:

Gentle movement afterwards feels good: a walk, some easy stretching, wandering around the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which is 3.4 miles up Hwy 5 and open most of the year. Nothing ambitious. The idea is to end the day still moving, not to do anything to your muscles.

The heavy session is the one to move. A max-effort lift, a long run or a hard class the same evening tends not to go well, for two very ordinary reasons. First, you've just spent an hour at complete rest and your sense of your own limits is genuinely off — people misjudge that first set. Second, you're about to confuse normal training soreness with post-massage tenderness and have no idea which is which for the next two days.

Tomorrow is fine. If your week only works with the gym on massage day, go before rather than after and book the oil massage for the evening slot — we're open until 9 PM, which is precisely why that slot exists.

The best massage appointment is the one with nothing behind it. If you can arrange it, book late and go home afterwards — the 7 PM slot on a weeknight is quietly the best booking on the schedule, and the reason our last sessions run to 9 PM.

Things that reliably waste a good session: a difficult meeting an hour later, a long drive in rush hour on the 212 corridor, a heavy meal immediately afterwards, and alcohol, which mostly just blunts the pleasant, floaty part you paid for. None of that is a rule. It's just what people report at the desk when they come back and say the last one didn't stick.

Eat something at some point, particularly if you skipped lunch before a 90-minute session. People do occasionally feel a little wobbly an hour afterwards, and it is almost always an empty stomach plus a long stretch of lying still rather than anything mysterious the massage did to them. A sandwich sorts it out.

If your day genuinely has no gap in it, that's still fine — plenty of people take a 30-minute session between errands and get straight back to it. Walking in on a Tuesday evening works too. Just know that the hour lands differently when the rest of the day is empty behind it.

Two days of information, which is worth more than anything you can tell a therapist before they've touched your back. How long the loose feeling lasted. Where you were tender and for how long. Whether the pressure through the shoulders was right, too much, or not enough to notice.

Say all of that in the first minute of the next session. It's the fastest route to a session dialled in properly, and it saves the therapist the twenty minutes of careful reading they'd otherwise spend working it out again from scratch.

As for when that next one should be — the frequency guide answers it by goal rather than by package, and it comes to the unhelpful but honest conclusion that there's no schedule. Every four to eight weeks suits most people. Call or text (612) 600-9298 when it does.