Massage

There’s one big problem with studying the effectiveness of massage: you can’t control for the placebo effect. “It’s not something where you can do a
double-blind experiment,” admits Trish Schiedel, past president of the Canadian Sports Massage Therapists Association. So you often see results
 by researchers at the Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland. They asked volunteers to perform difficult
exercises with both arms, then massaged just one of the arms, and evaluated recovery over the next four days. Subjects said the massaged arms
felt better—but there were no measurable differences in swelling or range of motion. That’s pretty much the story of massage research so far: lots
of anecdotal evidence and a scarcity of hard facts. But in the last few years, some studies have emerged that avoid the placebo problem and
debunk some old myths.
During the many years that muscle soreness after workouts was thought to result from an accumulation of lactic acid, massage was believed to
help flush the acid out. The lactic acid theory is now largely discredited —and even if it wasn’t, experiments published in 2010 by
researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, show that post-exercise massage actually slows down removal of lactate rather than
speeding it up. The reason, according to lead researcher Michael Tschakovsky, is that massage strokes mechanically compress tissue, which
squeezes blood vessels shut and prevents the flow of blood.
To find out how massage does work, researchers at Ohio State University enlisted the aid of rabbits, which aren’t susceptible to the placebo
effect. They first exercised the sedated rabbits by triggering a nerve impulse that causes contractions of a leg muscle. They then used a machine to
deliver “cyclic compression forces” that simulated 30 minutes a day of Swedish massage (the most common type of sports massage). The results
were clear: massaged muscles regained 59 percent of their lost strength after four days, whereas rested muscles regained only 14 percent. The
massaged muscles had fewer damaged fibers and almost none of the white blood cells associated with muscle damage. They also weighed less,
suggesting that massage had helped prevent swelling. Interestingly, the results were much less pronounced if the first massage was delayed for a
day after exercise, suggesting that the sooner you get your massage, the better.
The rabbit results won’t extrapolate perfectly to humans, cautions Thomas Best, the researcher who led the Ohio State study. But these
quantifiable outcomes should help scientists begin to figure out the duration, frequency, and strength of the massage stimulus that produces the
best results. Right now, the right strength is determined by feel, while frequency and duration tend to be a function of how much you can afford. “If
you ask five different therapists, you’ll get five different answers,” Best says. That means finding a good therapist with expertise in sports massage
(not aromatherapy and executive stress backrubs) is essential.