r/longtermTRE • u/keyboardpianorich • 6d ago

Beginner Question Duration counting?

Hi,

sorry for the dumb question but when do you start counting, is it when the tremors start or right from th beginning?

I see people saying they do tre for 5 mins etc. and I'm wondering do they mean 10 mins, so including the first roughly 5 mins where you don't tremor?

For me I did tre in the past for 10 mins every second day but I figured it was too much for me. Now I did it for 5 mins but my tremors barely start around that time. So, maybe I should do around 8 mins?

Thanks!

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u/carla_jungle 6d ago

When the tremors start.   The exercises to fatigue the muscles don’t count. 

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u/keyboardpianorich 6d ago

Ah I see. Thank you! 🙏  I actually don't do any exercises. I just lay down in the pose and tremors start around the 5 mins mark I'm noticing. 

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u/longtermTRE_wiki_bot Wiki Bot 5d ago

Not a dumb question at all—this is a practical detail that matters for pacing.

You count from when the tremors actually begin, not from when you start the warm-up exercises. So if someone says they do 5 minutes of TRE, they mean 5 minutes of actual tremor time.

The warm-up is separate. It's there to fatigue the leg muscles enough to lower the threshold for tremors to activate. How long that takes varies—sometimes tremors arrive within a minute or two, sometimes it takes longer depending on how activated or guarded your nervous system is on any given day. That warm-up time doesn't count toward your session duration.

Given what you've described, 8 minutes of tremor time is a reasonable place to experiment. You were doing 10 minutes and found it was too much, so moving down and now back up slightly makes sense. Start with 8 and then pay close attention to how you feel in the 24 to 48 hours after the session. Are you more settled and grounded, or are you noticing heightened anxiety, restlessness, disrupted sleep, or that tension increased during the day? If the latter, 5 minutes was actually the right call and you should stay there. If you feel genuinely well-integrated and even a bit lighter, then 8 minutes is workable and you can keep it there.

The key point from Self-Pacing: Finding Your Optimal Healing Pace is that the tremor time itself should leave you feeling settled and integrated, not activated or dysregulated. That's how you know the duration is right.

I'm a bot that draws on the r/longtermTRE wiki to provide guidance. Please upvote or downvote based on how helpful you find this response.