Before an event,
or after one
A massage will not make you faster, which is worth knowing before you book one for the morning of your event. What it can do is smaller but more useful, and the timing is earlier than most people think.
A massage will not make you faster, which is worth knowing before you book one for the morning of your event. What it can do is smaller but more useful, and the timing is earlier than most people think.
Plenty of places offer a massage on the morning of an event. Jonathan works to a rule that says the opposite. It's worth knowing which one the research supports.
Start with what a pre-event massage does for performance, because that is what's being sold. Reviews of the research found no effect on strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance or fatigue. Flexibility and soreness improve a little, and nothing else changes. Then there's what nobody puts on a booking page: more than about nine minutes of massage right before competing tended to make maximal strength, sprinting and jumping measurably worse. One explanation is that it takes some of the spring out of your muscles just when you need it.
Compare that with what other clinics advise: fifteen to forty-five minutes before the start on one website, twenty-four hours on another, with promises about preventing injury and speeding up recovery that have no evidence behind them. The first falls right in the window the research warns about, and both are inside the 48 hours Jonathan leaves as a minimum. He worked to that rule before anyone checked the research. It just turned out that the cautious rule is the one the research supports.
Findings from systematic reviews of sports massage and performance, and from a review of pre-performance massage and maximal strength; the timing advice is quoted from four UK clinic pages read in August 2026. Full pass with links in the research note.
And the boundary is the same here as everywhere else on this site: if it turns out to need a diagnosis, a scan or a prescription, Jonathan will say so and point you to the person who can, rather than work around it.
A session before an event and one after it are not the same massage at different times. They are two different kinds of work. Say what you want from it and this shows you what fits, including the two cases where you need something else.
Quicker, lighter and more general. The aim is for you to move freely on the day, so nothing goes deep enough to leave you sore. You want to feel nothing on the day, so any deep work happens early enough to settle.
Reviews of the research found no effect on strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance or fatigue, and only small changes in flexibility and soreness. More than about nine minutes right before competing made maximal strength, sprinting and jump height measurably worse.
Figures from systematic reviews of sports massage and performance; see the evidence note.
The usual advice is fifteen to forty-five minutes before the start, which is exactly when the research says it hurts your performance. Jonathan's rule is further out. Both are below.
If there is a date in the diary →You have a date, and the instinct is to book close to it. The better question is which week.
Ask which week →Jonathan has worked to both from the start. The research below shows why they hold up.
Fifteen to forty-five minutes before the event, on one page. Twenty-four hours, on another. Pre-event work to prevent soreness and injury; post-event work to cut recovery time significantly. None of those claims stands up when you check the research.
Advice quoted from four UK clinic pages, August 2026; see the evidence note.
Two of the four answers send you somewhere else, and one tells you not to book when you were planning to. That isn't modesty. Saying all four were worth booking would mean saying things that aren't true.
I want to move well on the day: the lighter one, and the one everybody sells.
Quicker, lighter and more general. The aim is for you to move freely on the day, so nothing goes deep enough to leave you sore. You want to feel nothing on the day, so any deep work happens early enough to settle.
Reviews of the research found no effect on strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance or fatigue, and only small changes in flexibility and soreness. More than about nine minutes right before competing made maximal strength, sprinting and jump height measurably worse.
Figures from systematic reviews of sports massage and performance; see the evidence note.
The usual advice is fifteen to forty-five minutes before the start, which is exactly when the research says it hurts your performance. Jonathan's rule is further out. Both are below.
Fifteen to forty-five minutes before the event, on one page. Twenty-four hours, on another. Pre-event work to prevent soreness and injury; post-event work to cut recovery time significantly. None of those claims stands up when you check the research.
You have a date, and the instinct is to book close to it. The better question is which week.
Ask which week →I found Jonathan's ad online and messaged for a last minute massage as I was feeling very sore in my legs and other parts. He went out of his way to accommodate me.
You can, but it's the one Jonathan will talk you out of. It isn't dangerous: the research found a measurable drop in strength and sprint tests after longer massage right beforehand, not an injury risk. But there's no benefit to weigh against that. If the morning is genuinely your only option, you'd honestly be better off warming up.
Because anything deep enough to be worth doing needs time to settle before you load it, and the day before does not leave any. Jonathan had that rule before anyone looked up the research. When they did, the research backed him, not the rest of the industry. It could easily have gone the other way.
All of it. "Event" just means a date that matters to you. A first 10k, a charity ride, a Sunday league final and a hiking weekend are all the same: a fixed date you can't move, and a body you want in working order when it comes. None of this depends on how fast you are.
Later than the same evening, which is when most people want one. Massage in the first day or two does the least good, so ask before you pick a day. If it was a marathon, the marathon page goes through the fortnight after, week by week.
Jonathan won't promise you an outcome, and that's deliberate. There is research on it, and some of it is encouraging, but a claim about what a session achieves needs stronger evidence than he has, and he won't pretend otherwise. What he can honestly describe is what the session is like: slow, unhurried and focused on how you feel. That's what the panel above describes.
Possibly, and Jonathan is the one who will say so. He is not a physiotherapist, and this is soft tissue work, one-to-one. If what you have turns out to need a diagnosis, a scan or a prescription, he will tell you and point you at the right person rather than keep you on the table.
If there is a date in the diary, the useful conversation is which week to come in, not which morning.
Book a sessionOr start from where you are: something already hurts, or nothing hurts yet.
