The massage therapist probed the aching muscles with gentle fingertips; she ran her hands along the body searching for tightness. The subject exhaled audibly, a sound the therapist said indicated pleasure. A day spa? Not this massage. It happened in a barn.

Midge Beecher of Chester does equine massage. Often the massages take place in the days before the horse will be performing in a show.

“Whatever is tight restricts the muscles,” she says.

In most cases, Midge works on dressage horses, but she also has worked on animals that will appear in Western riding shows. These shows are not rodeos, but events that feature reining and trail riding. Midge has also given massages to the horses used in the High Hopes riding program, designed for people with a range of physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities in Old Lyme.

On a recent morning at Fox Ledge Farm in East Haddam, Midge worked first on Monument, a gelding who was having trouble bending to his right.

“Is there anything I should know? He’s not happy. Have you had the saddle checked?” Midge asked the horse’s owner.

As Monument exercised in the ring, Midge made suggestions.

“Let him have his head; let him loosen up,” she advised.

Next came a massage for Sophie. Ribbons of blue, yellow, and pink decorated her stall door.

“She’s very moody, tends not to like other horses,” Midge said. “She lives in a personal bubble.”

Sophie, nonetheless, was docile as she got her massage. When a visitor asked how Midge knew what areas of the horse’s body she should concentrate on, she explained that the horse would let her know.

“She moved to put me just where she wanted me to be,” Midge explained.

Sophie appeared to be comfortable with the massage.

“She’s chewing, and that’s a sign of relaxing,” Midge pointed out.

Everything doesn’t always work smoothly. On occasion Midge has gotten nipped—she explains that’s how a horse can tell her something she is doing is hurting.

“If the horse is snapping, you know something is not right. It’s like a person yelling ‘Ouch,’” she says. “I back off and later I might come back to the spot with a different technique.”

On at least one occasion, Midge got more than a nip. A horse kicked her so violently that she says she still has an indentation on her leg from it. She wasn’t even near the horse when it happened, but on the opposite side of the stall.

On the other hand, massage relaxes some horses to the point that Midge says they “zone out.” Midge gives every owner a diagram, showing a horse’s muscle structure and marks the area she has worked on.

As with people, Midge points out, there are personality types among horses—varieties of introverts and extroverts. Experts refer to the different dispositions as “horsenality.” Moreover, horses can vary in their response to massage by gender. Mares, according to Midge, are generally trickier to massage than geldings. So far, Midge hasn’t worked on a stallion. She says there are far fewer of them in the dressage world.

Midge’s introduction to the world of equine massage came through her acquaintance with the work of Jack Meagher and Jo-Ann Wilson, pioneers in the field. Working with horses was new to her, but massage itself was not. She already had massage therapy business for humans, Action Potential Performance Massage, focused on athletic readiness, a business she still continues. The jump from working on people to working on horses, according to Midge, wasn’t a huge leap.

“There was no hesitation. The muscles are the same; it’s just the orientation that is different, horizontal instead of vertical,” she says.

A New Jersey native, she majored in physical education at Skidmore College and got a master’s degree with a specialty in biomechanics from Springfield College. She has also studied at the Connecticut Center for Massage Therapy.

Midge began her professional life as an athletic coach, focusing on tennis and basketball. She has coached at Wesleyan as well as at Sweet Briar, a small Virginia college. A shoulder injury and Lyme arthritis put an end to Midge’s coaching career, as well as to her passion for long-distance running. She remains, nonetheless, a regular exerciser and now has two horses of her own that she rides.

During her coaching career, Midge painted as recreation. She has also tried her hand at screenwriting, with a plot that revolved around New Mexico, horses, and ranching. Midge says she came up with the story idea and then enlisted a friend to help with the writing. When the friend moved to Cape Cod, collaboration became far more difficult.

“It’s sort of in limbo now,” Midge admits.

According to Midge, massage, whether for horses or people is the kind of good thing that a body cannot get too much of. She points to comedians Bob Hope and George Burns, who, reportedly had daily massages in old age.

“And they lived to 100,” she says.