How Often Should You Get a Massage? A Therapist's Guide
People ask me this one all the time. It usually comes up at the end of a session, when they're finally off the table, relaxed, and starting to realize they maybe should have done this sooner.
The honest answer is: it depends. But that's not a cop-out. It genuinely depends on why you're getting massage in the first place. Are you managing something specific? Trying to stay ahead of stress and tension? Training hard and recovering harder? The answer looks different for each of those.
Let me break it down the way I think about it with my clients.
Once a Month: The Baseline
For most people, once a month is a really solid starting point.
If you're not dealing with a specific condition, not in an intense training block, and life is more or less "busy but manageable," then a monthly in-home massage gives your body something to look forward to and keeps tension from building into something harder to address.
Think of it like maintenance for your car. You're not waiting for the engine light to come on. You're just keeping things running the way they're supposed to. If you got an oil change more recently than a massage, it is probably time to get a massage. Our bodies are way more complex than your whip, I guarantee. Yet we make sure to change the oil every 10K, while neglecting our bodies.
Monthly sessions are also a good way to build a relationship with your therapist. After a few sessions, I start to know where your body holds things, what's changed since last time, and where we need to spend the most time. That context is genuinely useful and hard to replicate when someone is coming in every few months and we're starting from scratch each time.
If You're Managing a Condition, Frequency Increases
This is where the "it depends" really kicks in.
If you're working through something like sciatica, a frozen shoulder, chronic neck tension, or a repetitive strain issue, once a month probably isn't enough to move the needle. When there's actual dysfunction in the tissue, the body needs more frequent input to start reorganizing and releasing patterns that have often been there for months or years.
In these cases, I'll usually recommend starting with sessions every one to two weeks. Once we start to see real progress and your body is holding the improvements between sessions, we can start spacing things out. The goal is always to get you to a place where maintenance takes over from active treatment.
Research supports this approach. A randomized clinical trial published in The Spine Journal found that participants receiving massage for chronic neck pain who received additional "booster" sessions showed clinically meaningful improvement in both pain and dysfunction compared to those who didn't.* Consistency matters. Especially early on.
Weekly: The Gold Standard (If You Can Swing It)
I'll be straight with you. Weekly massage is incredible, and the people I see every week tend to feel the best. Bob Hope got a massage every day! Life’s true goal if you ask me…
Here's why it works so well: the body is cumulative. When I'm working with someone every week, we're not chasing anything down. We're staying ahead of it. The week's tension hasn't had a chance to dig in yet, the tissue is already responsive, and we can use the session to genuinely build on the last one instead of spending half the time unwinding what's piled up. Athletes know this intuitively. But honestly, even if you're not an athlete, your body is still taking hits every week. Stress, sitting, commuting, workouts, bad sleep. It adds up.
Weekly sessions catch that accumulation before it becomes a problem. And over time, the changes start to compound. Your range of motion improves and stays improved. Tension patterns start to release. Your nervous system gets more comfortable dropping into a parasympathetic state, which has its own whole cascade of benefits.
I'm not going to pretend that weekly massage fits everyone's schedule or budget. But if you can make it work, even for a few months, I think you'll feel the difference in a way that's hard to describe until you've experienced it.
So, What's Right for You?
Here's a simple way to think about it:
Maintenance and general wellness: once a month
Managing a condition or recovering from injury: every one to two weeks to start, then spacing out as things improve
Active training, high-stress periods, or performance prep: weekly or every two weeks
The best frequency is the one you can actually stick to. Even if monthly is what your schedule allows right now, that's still meaningful. You'll still feel it. Your body will still respond.
And if things change, we adjust. That's kind of the whole point of doing an intake at the start and checking in as we go.
What Happens When You Wait Too Long
I see this pattern a lot. Someone books a session, feels amazing, and then life gets in the way. Three months go by. Sometimes six. They come back and we spend the first half of the session just unwinding what's built up since we last worked together.
There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not judging anyone. But it does mean we're doing catch-up work instead of actually moving forward. The longer you wait, the more we're starting from zero instead of building on progress.
One session every few months is still better than nothing. But it's a different experience than working with your body consistently over time.
Ready to Figure Out Your Schedule?
If you're in Los Angeles and you've been thinking about making massage a regular part of your routine, I'd love to help you figure out what actually makes sense for your body and your life. I offer mobile massage therapy throughout the LA area, from Beverly Hills and West Hollywood to Santa Monica, Studio City, Encino, Calabasas, and beyond. I come to you, which makes it a lot easier to actually keep a consistent schedule.
Book a session here and we'll figure out where to start.
References
* Cook AJ, Wellman RD, Cherkin DC, Kahn JR, Sherman KJ. Randomized clinical trial assessing whether additional massage treatments for chronic neck pain improve 12- and 26-week outcomes. Spine J. 2015;15(10):2206-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spinee.2015.06.049
