When you search the Internet for the various types of massages that exist in the world, you will usually only find rather “light” articles that enumerate a limited, arbitrary mixed set of individual massage modalities, massage treatment functional groups, and massage techniques. At best you’ll find websites that have given it more than a superficial effort, but even those tend to compare apples and pears, as the saying goes.
I think this is somewhat confusing, to say the least. I found, that if one wants to come to a useful, clear overview of massage types, one needs to distinguish between functional types (applications), individual treatment modalities, and types according to the massage techniques used. Surely one could also categorize otherwise, such as per region, for instance, massages of Asia or Europe, or traditional and modern, and what not, and I do realize that our approach is of course only one of many.
Nonetheless, in our eBook The Art of Massage, I have tried to come to a meaningful categorization, and you’ll find, besides an overview of massage concepts and massage tools, sections that distinguish between massage types according to their applications (functional types) and massage types according to the massage techniques used.
In this post, below, I give you a list of the functional types recognized, with links to a range of articles (posts) we’ve published, which further explain these specific massage types.
- Abdominal Massages
- Baby and Infant Massages
- Back Massages
- Body Sculpting and Slimming Massages
- Breast Massages
- Buttocks and Anal Massages
- Dearmoring Massages
- Erotic and Sensual Massages
- Facial Massages
- Foot Massages
- Fertility Massages
- Full Body and Partial Body Massages
- Genital Massages
- Geriatric Massages
- Hand Massages
- Happy Ending and Full Service Massages
- Head, Neck, and Shoulders Massages
- Hospice Massages
- Kinky and Fetish Massages
- Lymphatic Drainage Massages
- Masturbation and Genital Self-Massage
- Oncology Massages
- Orthopedic Massages
- Pediatric Massages
- Perinatal Massages
- Postnatal Massages
- Prenatal Massages
- Prostate and G-Spot Massages
- Remedial Massages
- Sports Massages