How Often Should You Get a Massage? An Honest Guide

For general wellness, once a month. That's the short answer — but the honest answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish, so here is the frequency guidance we actually give clients, goal by goal, including the part most articles skip: where extra sessions stop paying off.

| Your goal | Sensible starting cadence | Typical adjustment over time | | --- | --- | --- | | Everyday stress and tension | Monthly | Bi-weekly during rough seasons | | Chronic pain (back, neck, shoulders) | Weekly or bi-weekly | Taper to monthly as it improves | | Active training (running, surfing, lifting) | Bi-weekly | Weekly near races or heavy blocks | | General maintenance / prevention | Monthly | Hold steady — this is the long game |

The rest of this post explains the reasoning, because a table can't tell you when to change course.

If your goal is stress relief

Monthly is enough for most people. Stress-focused work — usually Swedish massage — shifts the nervous system out of its alert state, and clients commonly describe the effect lasting well beyond the session itself: better sleep for several nights, a looser jaw, a slower fuse.

That effect fades gradually rather than expiring, which is why monthly holds a decent baseline. When life turns genuinely hard — a brutal quarter at work, a new baby, a move — bumping to bi-weekly for a month or two is a reasonable intervention. Then drop back down. Treat the higher frequency as a season, not a lifestyle.

If your goal is chronic pain

Here the math changes. Long-standing tension patterns — the kind behind persistent neck, shoulder, and lower back complaints — rarely release meaningfully from a single session. The tissue tends to drift back toward its habitual state within days, especially when the original cause (desk posture, an old injury, one-sided lifting) is still in play.

So we usually suggest a loading phase: weekly or bi-weekly sessions for four to six weeks, which gives each session a chance to build on the last before the pattern fully reasserts itself. Once you notice the pain staying quieter between appointments, taper toward monthly maintenance. We've covered how this works in more depth in our post on deep tissue massage for chronic pain.

Two honest caveats. Massage supports pain management; it does not treat or cure any condition, and if your pain is new, severe, or comes with symptoms like numbness or weakness, see a doctor before you see us. And if six weeks of consistent work hasn't moved the needle at all, more massage is probably not the answer — that's a signal to loop in a physician or physical therapist.

If your goal is training and performance

Athletes are the group most likely to overdo frequency in enthusiasm, or underdo it in neglect. Bi-weekly is the workhorse cadence for people training consistently — enough to keep the recurring tight spots (calves and hips for runners, shoulders and lats for paddlers) from hardening into problems.

Timing matters as much as frequency. Deep work leaves muscles transiently sore, so schedule sports massage on recovery days or after your hard efforts, not the night before a long run up the coast or a race. In peak training blocks, weekly sessions earn their keep; in the off-season, monthly is plenty.

If your goal is maintenance

Maybe nothing hurts and you're not training for anything. Monthly is the answer, and there's not much more to say — which is itself worth saying. Maintenance massage isn't glamorous, but the clients who've kept a monthly appointment for years are consistently the ones who tell us they can't remember their last bad tension flare-up.

There's a practical reason maintenance works better than rescue. When we see the same body every month, small changes get caught early — a hip that's started gripping after a new running route, a shoulder creeping toward trouble — and addressed in minutes rather than becoming the reason for an urgent booking in six weeks.

Where more stops helping

Frequency has diminishing returns, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you extra sessions. The jump from "a few times a year" to monthly is dramatic. Monthly to bi-weekly is noticeable, particularly for pain and training. Bi-weekly to weekly helps in specific situations — a loading phase, a peak block — and beyond weekly, benefits flatten out for nearly everyone while the soreness from repeated deep work starts to accumulate.

Budget belongs in this calculation too. Sessions run $119 for 60 minutes and $159 for 90, plus travel by area — the full breakdown is on our pricing page. If you're choosing between bi-weekly 90-minute sessions and weekly 60s, we'll usually steer you toward whichever one you'll sustain past April. Cadence you keep beats cadence you planned.

A starting point, not a prescription

Pick the row from the table that matches your goal, run it for two months, and adjust based on how your body responds between sessions — not during them. The between is where the real information lives.

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