Pain Management Health Center

Massage May Help Sore Muscles Recover

Massage May Be Serious Medicine continued...

And it echoes a 2008 study in rabbits, which found that rubbed muscle tissue recovered more strength after exercise than muscle tissue that was simply rested, with less swelling and inflammation.

As encouraging as these findings are, however, there’s still a lot the study isn’t able to say.

Priscilla Clarkson, PhD, who studies post-exercise muscle soreness, cautions that the study didn’t look at whether massage actually improved pain.

“If a massage gives you temporary respite from the pain, by all means, try it. However, these molecular changes may have no effect -- or may need to be elicited many times to have a lasting effect,” Clarkson, who is distinguished professor of kinesiology at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says in an email.

What’s also not known is whether massage may still be helpful if a person gets a rubdown hours or days after a hard workout instead of just minutes.

Still, scientists who say they were once wary that massage had any real benefits, beyond relaxation, say they are starting to come around.

“I went into all of this truly skeptical,” says Mark H. Rapaport, MD, chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral services at Emory University in Atlanta.

“I’ve changed. I think there is something there. We saw profound biological changes associated with it,” says Rapaport, referring to a 2010 study published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which found that Swedish massage boosted immune function and decreased stress hormones compared to a placebo.

“There’s a real consistency between their results and our results,” Rapaport says. “I was amazed at how positive their results were based on a really brief intervention.”