How Often Should You Do Red Light Therapy — And Is More Always Better?

There's a common assumption with most things in life that if a little is good, more must be better. And it makes sense, right?

We see this all the time in the recovery industry. Do it every day, stack the sessions, and you'll recover faster. It's an understandable but quality beats quantity every time.

Red light therapy is no exception. People think jumping on the red light every day is the best way to optimize their recovery. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that, and we'll show you why saving you both time and money.

How Much is Too Much

The right red light frequency depends on whether you're working through an acute issue or maintaining once you're past it.

For general recovery and performance, 2-3 sessions a week on a given area at 10-20 minutes per session (30-60 minutes in total), is the maintenance range. That's enough to deliver the benefit without pushing past the point where more stops helping.¹

For an acute issue or active inflammation, more often makes sense in the short term. When something's actively flared up, there's a real inflammatory process to work against, and red light helps calm it by getting the tissue producing energy again and dialing down the inflammation that's stalling the healing.² So you run it daily, or close to it, while you're working through the worst of it (usually 1-2 weeks). Once things start settling and you feel the response, that's your cue to back off to 2-3 sessions a week to maintain.

The daily push during an acute phase isn't the same as "more is always better." It's a short, deliberate stretch to resolve a specific problem, and it ends the moment you get a response. Running daily sessions indefinitely, past the point of a clear result, is exactly where the extra sessions stop earning their place. Find the frequency that fits your goal, stay consistent, and stop there.

Where It Fits in Your Recovery Plan

Red light was never meant to be the centerpiece of your recovery bit it's an important supporting piece. It does its best work layered on top of the fundamentals: hands-on tissue work, movement, sleep, and nutrition, supporting your overall recovery instead of trying to carry the load on its own.

That's exactly how I use it at BBPS. Red light falls under infrared therapy which is delivered in two ways, a full-body infrared mat and a targeted medical-grade red light unit, which differ in how the infrared reaches you and the type being used. The specifics of that are their own conversation, and if you want them I broke down how it works and why the type of infrared matters in my post on red light therapy for athletes. What matters here is that the right dose from equipment that actually reaches the tissue will always beat hours logged under a weak consumer panel that never penetrates deep enough to do much of anything, and that I match it to what you're actually working on instead of running everyone through the same schedule.

If you want to see how your body responds, it's an easy place to start. You can add a targeted red light session onto any bodywork session for $35, or book it on its own as a standalone 30-minute session for $40.

Sources

¹ Huang YY, Chen ACH, Carroll JD, Hamblin MR. Biphasic dose response in low level light therapy. Dose Response. 2009;7(4):358-383. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790317/

² Hamblin MR. Mechanisms and applications of the anti-inflammatory effects of photobiomodulation. AIMS Biophys. 2017;4(3):337-361. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5523874/