It is a common assumption that massaging muscles after exercise increases blood flow and helps in the removal of lactic acid. Unfortunately, there’s never been a scientific study to attempt to prove this claim. So researchers at Queen’s University decided to test the widely held theory. And their results “show that massage actually impairs blood flow to the muscle after exercise, and that it therefore also impairs the removal of lactic acid from muscle after exercise.”
Whoops.
This is just one study and it might seem shocking that such a broadly accepted hypothesis is false. But pretty much every athlete on the planet thought stretching before exercise was great idea until science showed that it not only doesn’t help, it often hurts.
So I don’t have to stretch before exercise and I don’t have to get a massage after. If the other shoe drops on the part in the middle, I’m gonna be able to catch up on some serious down time.
Update: Reader Christian Eager writes in with the following.
The post regarding massage caught my eye because of its reference to lactic acid and the study’s finding that massage doesn’t help remove it from muscles. I certainly am open to the finding that massage isn’t beneficial (I’m an amateur bicycle racer, and I’ve never found massage to be especially helpful in recovery), but, from the Science Daily article, it seems their main evidence for its lack of benefit is that blood flow is not increased, and therefore lactic acid and “other waste products” are not reduced more quickly.
It’s been de-bunked that lactic acid is a waste product. It’s not good for muscles to be bathed in lactic acid after exercise—it means that they are not using their fuel very efficiently—an analogy might be a leak in a car’s fuel line—but it doesn’t hinder recovery, so I’m not sure that their study, in turn, de-bunks massage as a recovery aid. If they’re measuring lactic acid as a waste product, it would seem to me that they’re working from a flawed foundation, and other assumptions and aspects of their methodology might be suspect.
Thanks for that addition. Indeed, all of these one-off studies should be view as suspect (or with skepticism).
