How Sports Massage Can Aid Healing

By Vanessa Agosta
[Health & Your Life]
What are the three primary roles for sports massage?  Vanessa Agosta tells you how sports massage can help exercisers.
You may feel the same way I used to about massages:  they are nice to have once in a while, but are really more for pleasure than for anything else.  Until recently, science would have agreed with us.  Now more research is showing that massage can actually help you heal from a hard day at the gym.

Placebo Effect?

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that massage is beneficial to us; however, most research has yet to produce quantifiable results that support this claim.  In a recent study published by researchers at the Poznan University of Medical Sciences in Poland, subjects performed difficult exercises with both arms and then received massage for just one of their arms.  Muscle recovery was evaluated over the next four days.  Even though subjects said the massaged arms felt better, there were no measurable differences in inflammation or range of motion.

This type of result is called the placebo effect.  It is what happens when subjects say they feel better after having been given a false treatment (e.g. a sugar pill).  Many studies on massage come up with the same conclusion:  its benefits lie in the belief that it will make you feel better.

The difficulty in doing studies on massage is that it is hard to control all the variables in the experiment.  For example, it is impossible to devise a double-blind study for massage.  In a double-blind study, neither the person administering the treatment nor the receiver of the treatment knows what type of treatment is being administered.

Clever Science

Interestingly, researchers at Ohio State University came up with a creative way of eliminating the placebo effect in rabbits, at least.  Their work, which will appear in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, provides some of the first concrete evidence for the biological basis of sport massage.

It was once believed that muscle soreness after workouts was the result of an accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles and massage was believed to help flush the acid out.  This theory is now largely discredited and muscle soreness is instead thought to result from microscopic tears in muscle fibres.  Although your body eventually repairs this tissue, new tears will continue to appear for several days after a bout of exercise.  This is possibly due to inflammation of the affected area.

To investigate the role of massage in relieving sore muscles, researchers exercised sedated rabbits by triggering a nerve impulse that caused contractions of a leg muscle.  They then used a machine that simulated 30 minutes a day of Swedish massage (the most common type of sports massage).  The results were telling.  Massaged muscles regained 59 per cent of their lost strength after four days, whereas rested muscles regained only 14 per cent.

The massaged muscles also had fewer damaged fibres and almost none of the white blood cells associated with muscle damage.  The muscles 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.

It is not prudent to assume that the same thing happens in humans, but these results should help scientists begin to figure out the duration, frequency and strength of the massage stimulus that produces the best results.
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