One of the questions I occasionally receive is why my sessions are generally 60–75 minutes when some practitioners offer 90-minute, two-hour, or even longer appointments.
The short answer is that I don’t believe better results come from simply spending more time on the table. They come from offering the right amount of input for your body and nervous system to meaningfully use.
There are certainly times when a longer session is appropriate. If something important is unfolding, or if it seems that additional time would genuinely support the process, I’m happy to continue. The length of a session should always serve the person, not the clock.
That said, over the years my perspective has shifted.
Early in a practitioner’s career, longer sessions can be incredibly valuable. They provide more time to observe, think, explore different approaches, and develop the clinical judgment that only comes through experience.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many of the practitioners I most respect—including several of the teachers I’ve had the privilege of studying with—have gradually shortened their sessions as they’ve gained experience. This has also been true in my own practice. That isn’t because they’ve become less thorough. Quite the opposite. With experience often comes greater precision. They need fewer interventions to help the body move toward change, and they become increasingly aware that more intervention is not always more beneficial.
The second reason is even more important.
Although bodywork is often thought of as working on muscles or fascia, meaningful change is also something your nervous system has to perceive, interpret, and integrate. Every touch, every movement, and every shift provides your brain with new information about your body—how it moves, where it is in space, what feels safe, and what no longer requires protection.
Your nervous system is constantly updating its internal map of you.
That process takes time.
It’s easy to assume that if some change is good, then more change must be even better. Yet biology rarely works that way. There is an amount of new information that the nervous system can meaningfully process during a session. Beyond that point, additional input doesn’t necessarily create additional benefit. Sometimes it simply creates more information for the brain to sort through.
Many people naturally judge a session by how much was done. A longer session can feel like more value simply because more happened.
Yet feeling like more happened and creating more lasting change are not necessarily the same thing.
Over the years, my thinking has shifted from asking, “How much change can I create during this session?” to asking a different question:
“How much change is this person’s nervous system likely to meaningfully integrate?”
Those are not always the same.
The purpose of a session is not to maximize intervention. It is to maximize integration.
Sometimes that means doing less than I could. Sometimes it means pausing rather than continuing. Sometimes it means ending a session while it feels as though there is still more that could be done, trusting that the nervous system now has the space it needs to continue organizing what has already begun.
In fact, many clients notice that some of the most meaningful changes occur after they leave the office. Over the following hours and days, posture feels different, movement becomes easier, breathing changes, and familiar activities often require less effort. The session doesn’t simply end when you get off the table. In many respects, that’s when another phase of the process begins.
This is why most of my sessions are 60–75 minutes. I’ve found that this length consistently provides enough time to listen carefully, work precisely, and create meaningful change while still respecting the nervous system’s remarkable capacity to learn and reorganize.
My goal isn’t to do as much as possible during our time together.
My goal is to help your body and nervous system continue doing meaningful work long after the session is over.