There is no doubt that they feel good and relax. However, this is what evidence says about its physical impact on the body. The massages They are not just for luxury spas that serve cucumber water. For many amateur and professionals, it is a continuation of your training program.
The races usually have massage stalls, many high -level gyms offer massages after training and most elite sports teams have a hired masseuse. The massage gun market is estimated at more than 500 million dollarsaccording to several market research companies, headed by dozens of companies, such as Theragun, Ekrin and Mebak. But most athletes do not need much conviction.
“If you talk to athletes, massage is one of your favorite recovery strategies,” said Shona Halson, professor of exercise sciences at the Australian Catholic University. “And we all know why: because it feels good. Obviously, it is doing something that athletes perceive as beneficial.”
There is no doubt that massage can make you feel better in the short term and many people discover that, together with foam rollers, you can relieve muscle knots and even increase flexibility. And as a athlete, I have discovered that massage almost always makes me feel better after a race or hard training.
But, as a scientific journalist, I have asked myself what really makes my body. So I investigated in the studies and talked to the researchers who have studied it. This is what they said.
What does the massage for the body
One of the most common statements about the benefits of massage is that it helps recovery by improving blood flow and eliminating lactic acid, a chemical to which muscle pain is attributed after an intense exercise.
But although this gives for a good story, Halson said, the tests “They are not there”First, the studies of lactic acid have long exonerated as a cause of muscle pain, and there is no need to accelerate its elimination, because the body eliminates it naturally without help, he explained.
In addition, anyone who exercises regularly usually has a good blood flow. The techniques to expel the blood from the limbs interest mostly people with circulation problems, he said.
Even so, the idea that massage helps to eliminate the waste products from the muscles persists, although it is a chemical process – not physical compression – that displaces these substances through the cell membrane, said Martin Hoffman, a retired doctor of physical medicine and rehabilitation of the University of California in Davis.
The reality is that most of the supposed physiological benefits of massage are not backed by solid tests. A 2020 meta -analysis on the effect of performance massage and recovery reviewed 29 studies (mostly small) with 1012 participants and discovered that massage did not produce measurable improvements in fatigue or performance, and there were only modest benefits for muscle pain and flexibility.
“We barely find evidence that massages are useful,” said Timothy Chico, lead author of the study and professor of cardiovascular medicine at the British University of Sheffield.
However, some benefits of massage may not be easy to measure. According to Halson, the muscle feels very different from the touch after being treated, which suggests that it could loosen muscle tension.
What the massage does for the mind
According to experts, The greatest benefit of massage can be psychological.
Hoffman and his colleagues conducted a randomized controlled essay to check the benefits of massage in 72 runners who had barely completed the Western State Endurance Run 2015, a 160 -kilometer path in Sierra Nevada. They compared the traditional massage of a therapist trained with pneumatic compression boots, which squeeze and knead the muscles of the feet and legs. They found that both types of massage immediately relieved muscle pain and fatigue, but that the effect was temporary.
Similarly, a 2020 review of sports massage did not find any physiological benefit of massage.
There may be something neurological at stake, according to some small studies, at least when it comes to massage guns. It is known that skin vibration reduces pain in some contexts. It is still investigating how exactly works, but a small study pointed as a possible explanation to the interactions between two regions of the brain involved in the coding of pain and touch.
Experts claim that one of the greatest benefits of massage may be that it helps reduce stress and tension. Although it has not been the subject of many studies, massage can clearly help people relax and free themselves from mental and vital tensions that can cause fatigue and harm physical recovery, said Halson.
“For some athletes, massage is a moment of reflection on experience and download,” he explained.
The essential
“Massage is not magic”, Says Tim Roberts, vice president of Therabody science and innovation, which manufactures massage guns and compression boots.“ Massage guns are not a secret way of improving recovery. ”Instead, he said, they work with your body to improve what he is already doing.
His point of view resonated in me. While investigating for a book about the recovery of the exercise, I tried dozens of tricks to after training and discovered that most simply helped you relax or feel that you were doing something while your body was cured. But that does not mean that they are not worth it.
Even knowing that the physical benefits of massage are very uncertain, it is still my favorite way to recover, not because I think you will eliminate toxins, but because it makes me feel very good and helps me to relax.
Probably that’s why for many athletes it is worth it, Halson said. When it comes to recovery, feeling better can count as a victory.