Imagine: you’re trying to lose weight. You go to the gym one day. You run a mile. Go on the elliptical for 10 minutes. You do squats. Lunges. Bench press. A million crunches. It’s a good workout! You feel amazing! You go home. Shower. Eat. Then decide that you’re doing well, so you don’t need to go again this week. Or next week. Or the rest of this month. Sure enough, a year has passed, and you haven’t lost any weight. You tried really hard to elicit a change in your body, but you went to the gym once. So when you go back to the gym a year later, everything was just as hard to do. You’ve made no progress. If anything, you’ve backtracked on your health goals. All of that work is meaningless if you have no frequency.
The same goes for massage therapy. Now, you do not need to go to your Massage Therapist every day to make a change. But you do need frequency. Frequency is key to success in any situation: learning an instrument, exercising, changing your diet, really anything.
We are not crazy Massage Therapists demanding you come in every single day! We do recognize that frequency is relative and dependent upon goals. Someone who has been in an accident and cannot turn their head needs more frequency than someone who wants to add massage to their preventative health regiment.
If you have recently been in an accident or are recovering from surgery or cannot move your head, aka an extreme case, your massage therapist might want to see you twice a week for an hour each. By receiving a treatment this frequently, the massage therapist is able to really work through tension, scar tissue, and more to increase range of motion and decrease pain. If you want to get rid of daily headaches and migraines, maybe once a week would be most beneficial. If you want to make changes and have a small amount of pain from everyday duties, every other week might be more fitting for you. Talk to your Massage Therapist about your goals and what you want from your sessions, and they will tell you the best way to achieve your dreams.
How to be frequent:
- Determine a goal. If you want your headaches to go away, plantar faciitis pain to decrease, increase range of motion, work on anxiety or depression, help your shoulder or back or neck pain, or get ready for an Iron Man Competition, that’s great! Make a goal or decide a desired outcome.
- Talk to your Massage Therapist. How on earth can your Massage Therapist help you if you do not inform him / her of your goals or aspirations? Have a detailed conversation and lay out a plan.
- Make it a priority. Life happens. You have to go shopping and stay for an inspection on your house. Trains delay arrival. There are so many things that can get in the way. But your health should be one of your highest priorities. After all, if you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?
- Follow through! This is the most important one. If you go through the first three steps but don’t have follow through, all progress will be for naught. Your recovery time will increase, you will not achieve your goals, and you will make the Massage Therapist’s job more difficult. You will be throwing money at us for no real reason. You will be wasting time, get frustrated, and then assume massage cannot help you. Please, please, please follow through. Come to appointments. If you need to reschedule, give us 24 hours’ notice. If you cannot give us 24 hours’ notice, call us anyway. We want to work with you, but we cannot if you fall off the face of the planet and never answer our emails or return our calls.
Please note: THIS IS NOT FOREVER! As much as we would love to see you twice a week for forever, our goal is to get you better! We don’t want to see you all of the time–we want to see you once or twice a month for maintenance. We don’t want to gouge your for money, we want to help. Getting through the tough spots–right at the beginning of a treatment plan–is the hardest part. Once you reach a certain level of health and wellness, we decrease your frequency.