The phrase appears everywhere in this trade and is almost never defined. It has a specific meaning: which surfaces do the work, how far they reach, and where the hour gets its pace from.
Full contact is a description of surfaces. Nothing more, and nothing coded.
It means the therapist's own body is the instrument. Forearm, chest, thigh, shin, the flat of a back. It means the contact is broad rather than local, and continuous rather than applied and lifted. It means she carries her weight onto you and governs the rate at which it arrives.
That is what the phrase covers. What follows are the consequences.
In a hand massage, the worked area is wherever the hands are. Everything else is waiting.
Full contact removes the waiting. A single pass down the back reaches the back, both flanks and the backs of the arms at the same time, because the surface doing the work is as wide as those things together. Over an hour this adds up to something quite different from an hour of hand massage. Not more pressure. More territory.
The front of the body is included, as are the legs, the feet and the hands. The technique page sets out the sequence in order.
Nobody can press hard with a forearm for an hour. Nobody tries.
The pressure in full contact comes from mass falling under control. A therapist braces through her legs, shifts her centre over the part of you she is working, and lets gravity supply the rest. She regulates how much of her own weight is on you and how fast it arrives. That is the skill, and it is why the roster prints height and build. Those are the working specifications of the instrument.
Two consequences. The pressure is deep without being sharp, because it is spread across a wide surface. And it cannot be hurried.
They open and close.
The first ten minutes are hands: oil going on, the skin warming, the therapist finding where you are held. The last ten are hands again, shorter strokes, bringing you back up. Between those, the hands appear only to renew oil. A session that was broad contact from the first second would not work. The hands are what make the wide pressure legible when it starts.
It does not mean pressure everywhere at once for sixty minutes. Contact moves. There is a sequence, and the sequence has quiet parts.
It does not mean a fixed list of body parts touching a fixed list of body parts. The surfaces used are whatever the position calls for.
It does not mean force. People book full contact expecting something strenuous and meet something heavy and slow instead.
And it does not name a single technique. Full contact is the category. The list holds five members of it, separated by material and staging rather than by method.
It suits people who have found hand pressure too narrow — the ones whose last massage was competent and ended with the shoulders still up. Broad pressure settles a nervous system that point pressure only negotiates with.
It suits people who dislike being asked how the pressure is every four minutes. In full contact there is little to adjust, so the question mostly does not come.
It asks very little of a room: a double bed, towels over the linen, and the door closed. We come to you, day or night, at the same rate either way. Forty-five therapists work these forms; you choose from photographs, height, build and languages before anything is confirmed.
An hour is enough to learn what it is. Ninety minutes is enough for it to do the thing it does.