To top athletes and anyone else who exercises a lot, a regular massage is considered almost as essential to keeping the body in condition as diet and training. Promises by deep-tissue massage therapists of increasing blood flow to aching muscles and purging metabolic waste products such as lactic acid are attractive after a hard workout.

The common myth is that nothing could be better for your aching limbs. Or could it? In a recent study by the American College of Sports Medicine’s, researchers claimed to have blown the myth that massage speeds up recovery from exercise. Professor Michael Tschavovsky of the health studies department at Queens University in Ontario, Canada, says that while most massage therapists believe that their work boosts circulation to the muscles and reduces fatigue, no study before his had tested the validity of this theory.

Tschavovsky asked 12 healthy male subjects to perform isometric hand-grip exercises for two minutes at a time while he and his team measured blood flow and lactic acid build-up every 30 seconds and for ten minutes after the exercise had finished. They also took the same measurements during rest, when the subjects had massage and during “active recovery” such as gentle jogging, walking or stretching. What they found was that massage did not increase — but decreased — blood flow to the muscles and hindered rather than improved the removal of lactic acid and other waste materials by as much as 25 per cent compared to “active recovery”.

“Anyone who believes that lactic acid symptoms are relieved by massage is wrong because the alleviation of discomfort is not due to waste products being flushed out after exercise,” Tschavovsky says. So does this mean that post-workout massage is a waste of time? Tschavovsky thinks not. He is a fan himself and admits to having massage to help his legs to recover after football tournaments. But he says that the benefits could all be in the mind. “It feels good, that’s the truth of it,” he says. “A lot of sports performance is psychologically based so if you feel you are in a better situation to train with massage then, yes, it probably does have the ability to improve your performance.”

What his study shows, Tschavovsky says, is not that massage is useless but that it isn’t helpful for the claimed reasons. The placebo effect of enjoying massage treatments may be more beneficial than muscle manipulation in reducing the affects of ailments.

SOURCE: Reuters