Should You Book 60, 90, or 120 Minutes

Think of a session as a time budget rather than a duration. Deep tissue spends its minutes unevenly, and once you see where they go, the choice makes itself.

Roughly ten minutes at the front of any session goes to warming, regardless of length. That is not padding. Cold tissue resists, and pressure into a muscle that has not been prepared is both less productive and more uncomfortable. Another few minutes at the end go to broader closing strokes. What is left is the working budget, and a single region worked at depth, meaning slow passes, holding trigger points, and following the tension into whatever feeds it, realistically eats fifteen to twenty-five minutes.

Do that arithmetic on an hour and you get roughly two regions done well. That is the honest ceiling. An hour is the right booking if you have one clear complaint, a shoulder or a low back or a pair of overworked calves, and you want it addressed properly rather than surveyed. It is also the right booking for a maintenance visit once you have a therapist who already knows your body.

Ninety minutes is the length most of our regular deep tissue clients settle on, and there is a structural reason for it. It gives room for the primary complaint plus the thing causing it. Neck tightness is often a chest and shoulder problem. A cranky low back is often hips. An hour forces the therapist to choose between the symptom and the source. Ninety lets them do both, and still close properly instead of stopping mid-thought.

Two hours is a different category of session. It is what you book when the answer to "where does it hurt" is a long list, when tension has been accumulating for years rather than months, or when you want genuinely full-body depth rather than a targeted repair. It is also the format that lets a therapist go back to a region a second time later in the session, after everything around it has released, which frequently gets further than the first pass did.

The scenarios, plainly. First deep tissue ever and unsure how you will find the intensity: book an hour. One stubborn area you can point at: an hour. Desk tension that has spread across your whole upper back and neck: ninety. Post-ski legs plus the back that carried the pack: ninety. Chronic pattern you have been ignoring since last year: ninety or two hours. Rare visit and you want to make it count: two hours.

What we would advise against is buying two hours to prove something. Depth is not endurance, and there is a real point past which more time stops adding value for a given body on a given day. If you are not sure, an hour and a conversation with your therapist at the end will tell you what to book next time. They will give you a straight answer.

Pricing scales with the clock and nothing else: $85, $125, and $165 for the three lengths, with no surcharge for choosing deep tissue over anything else on our menu. Add-ons like cupping or hot stones sit inside the session you booked, so factor that in when picking.