Massage near Antioch: two treatments in one hour, one price

Combination B swaps the table for the chair. The first half is the same 30 minutes of reflexology; the second is spent sitting up in the massage chair with your clothes on, while the therapist works neck, shoulders, back and arms. It is $80 for the hour, against $100 for those two halves booked apart.

If it is only your feet you came for, 60 minutes of foot reflexology is $80 and 90 minutes is $120, and neither is improved by cutting it in half. The combinations earn their place on the visit where you want both halves and have one hour to spend.

There is a changeover, and it takes a couple of minutes. For the reflexology half you stay dressed and reclined, with feet and lower legs bare; the table half is a normal table massage, so you get up, move and settle again in between.

That gap is the moment to say where the second half should go. Naming one area — upper back and shoulders, or the lower back — gives the therapist something to plan the half hour around, and half an hour covers one region properly rather than the whole body.

Loose pants help. The first half needs your feet, ankles and lower legs uncovered, and anything that pushes above the calf saves fussing at the start. For the table half you undress to the level you are comfortable with and stay under the sheet, the same as at any studio.

Book Combination B instead. The second half is done sitting up in the massage chair with your clothes on, which is easier if lying flat is uncomfortable, and quicker to get out of if you are going back to work afterwards.

Take A if you want the second half lying down on a table, and B if you would rather stay dressed and sitting up. Both run 60 minutes, both open with the same 30 minutes of reflexology, and the $10 between them is the difference between a half hour on the table and a half hour in the chair.

The chair covers neck, shoulders, back and arms, and it is on the menu by itself as well: 20 minutes for $35, 30 for $50, 45 for $70, an hour for $80. The table is the full-body version, and on its own it runs from $60 for a half hour to $160 for two hours.

Less than the charts on some waiting-room walls suggest. There is no strong evidence base for reflexology as a treatment for anything, and a diagram mapping zones of the foot onto your organs is a tradition rather than a finding.

NCCIH's overview of massage therapy reviews the trial evidence for 4 kinds of pain — low-back, neck and shoulder, knee osteoarthritis and headache — and reflexology is not among the techniques it covers. On massage generally, that page describes a 2015 review of 25 studies with 3,096 participants which found short-term improvement in acute and chronic low-back pain, while noting that the quality of those studies left the reviewers with "very little confidence" in the conclusion.

Where the research does get specific, it points at how long and how often rather than which technique. NCCIH's digest of what the science says describes a 2014 trial of 228 people with chronic neck pain in which 60 minute sessions repeated through the week did more than fewer or shorter ones. That is a reasonable argument for booking the full hour rather than half of one.

If you have something you want treated, see a clinician about it and tell them what you are booking.

Roughly ten miles, and under twenty minutes when the airport traffic is not against you. The studio is at 3877 Lebanon Pike, Hermitage, TN 37076, northeast of Antioch; Old Hickory Boulevard is the usual way up, and it meets Lebanon Pike in Hermitage.

A massage near Antioch therefore means a short drive north-east rather than a trip across town, and parking is free in the lot outside the door.

Open seven days: 10 AM to 8 PM Monday and Wednesday through Saturday, 12 to 7 PM on Sunday, 11 AM to 4 PM on Tuesday. A 60 minute combination has to start an hour before whichever of those closing times applies, so the Tuesday window is narrow.

Appointments run through Square, and the schedule shows what is genuinely open. Calling (615) 835-2603 is faster when you already have a time in mind, or when you want to ask whether the 60 minute combination still fits before a closing time.