About
It started on the table
One paid hour on the other side of the world was enough to change what Jörg Olbing thought a massage could be. Sestala started with a plane ticket and ended with a list of numbers.
How it started
He went to see for himself
He read that machines were giving massages and did not believe it could be any good - so he booked one to prove it, and lost the argument with himself.
01 The trip
He went and lay down on them
Jörg Olbing went to the United States, then to Asia. Not trade-fair demonstrations. Sessions he booked and paid for like anybody else, to find out what an hour is actually like.
02 On the table
Better than he expected
Mid-session he turned the pressure up, then back down - and the machine did exactly that, stroke for stroke, for as long as he wanted. With a person you ask, and you get their version of it. Here the hour did precisely what he asked of it, the whole hour long. That turned out to be the whole point.
03 Around the table
Everything around it
The hour itself was good. What surrounded it was not: a machine worth a room of its own, standing in a corridor, and sessions sold like a discount voucher. The machine was the easy half.
Back in Europe
Four questions nobody would answer
How much force may one of these apply to a person? How warm may it get? How fast must it stop? And who certifies that the person preparing your session works to a fixed protocol?
Clear answers were hard to come by. Harder still was finding a manufacturer able to meet every one of these needs for the European market - plenty of machines can give a massage, very few meet the minimum standard for what may stand in a Sestala studio. So he stopped asking, and started writing.
So Sestala is not only the machine, which anybody can buy. It is the hour around it: the limits it runs under, the room it stands in, the person who sets it up with you, and what happens between one session and the next. All of it designed so that an hour on a machine is the best recovery hour you can have.
The list
So we wrote one
He wrote the numbers before meeting a single supplier - conditions, not hopes. It is the moment "he" becomes "we": these are the limits every Sestala machine runs under, and the machine had to meet them rather than the other way round:
7 kg
The firmest it goes
Never
Above the shoulder
40 °C
Warmth, capped
450 ms
To stop
Every session
Set up and started by a person
None
Radiofrequency, EMS, shockwave, ultrasound
No standard supplies these numbers. They are ours, and every Sestala machine is held to them.
The test
Every room has to pass the same one: would we lie down on it tomorrow, and come back.
Where we are
No studio is open yet
When the first one opens in your city it will be on its own page, with the address and the price on it. Nothing opens until it can hold the standard on this page - and passes the test he used on that first table.
He lay down on one first. Then he wrote the rules.