What I’ve Learned From Watching Bodies Change Over Months, Not Minutes

I’ve been doing this work for over twenty years now, since I trained at Wat Pho in Bangkok, and there’s a question I get asked almost every week: “How often should I actually come in?” People expect a simple number. I never quite give them one, because the honest answer is that it depends on what your body has been doing to you for the last however-many years, and that only becomes clear once I’ve had a few sessions to actually feel it.

What I can tell you is what I notice, physically, in the room, when someone keeps coming back versus when they come once and disappear for six months.

The first session is almost always the same story. Someone arrives holding tension somewhere they’ve stopped consciously feeling — a shoulder that’s been hiked up so long it feels normal, a lower back that only complains when they finally sit still. I work on it, they leave feeling loose, and by the following week a good chunk of that tightness has quietly crept back in. That’s not the massage failing. That’s just how long it takes muscle memory to unlearn a habit that took years to build.

It’s the second, third and fourth visits where something different starts happening. The tissue doesn’t fully snap back to where it started. There’s a kind of running start — the body remembers, even faintly, what “open” felt like last time, and it gets there faster and holds it longer. I had a client a while back who’d been at a desk for fifteen years and genuinely couldn’t turn her head more than a few degrees each way. That didn’t shift in one session. It shifted because she kept showing up, and by the fourth or fifth visit she had her neck back — properly back, not just for a day.

My daughter Jariya works alongside me, and she’s noticed something I think is just as telling as the flexibility changes: people’s breathing. She’ll often say that a client comes in holding their breath without realising it — shallow, high in the chest, barely moving. By the middle of a session, once they’ve settled, their breathing evens out on its own. Nobody tells them to do that. It just happens once the body decides it’s safe to let go. That’s a nervous system thing, not a muscle thing, and it’s usually the clients who come back regularly who start noticing it happening in their daily life too — falling asleep faster, not lying awake running through tomorrow’s meetings.

I’ll say something that might sound like it goes against my own interest: I don’t think everyone needs to come weekly forever. What I’ve seen, over hundreds of clients now, is that a concentrated stretch of closer-together sessions — while something is actively wound tight — does more than the same number of sessions spread thin over a year. Once that base tension has actually shifted, a lot of people step back to fortnightly or monthly and hold onto it just fine. The mistake is stretching things out too early, before the pattern has actually broken, and then wondering why every session feels like starting from zero again.

None of this is mystical. Sen line work and assisted stretching are physical techniques doing physical things to physical tissue — I’m just describing what happens when you apply them with some consistency instead of as an occasional treat. If you want the fuller detail on the specific timeline I usually see play out, I wrote more about it here: How Often Should You Get a Thai Massage?

What I’d actually want someone to take from this isn’t a frequency chart. It’s that your body is allowed to need more than one visit to change, and that’s not a sign anything’s wrong with you or the treatment. It’s just how tissue and nervous systems actually work.

I’m Maliwan, founder and practitioner at Glasgow Thai Massage — trained at Wat Pho in Bangkok, twenty-plus years on the mat, and yes, this is our own account.