Massage may help recover sore muscles: Study

It's known that having a massage after an intense workout helps soothe the pain.

Now, a new study has found that its effects actually go beyond providing just a feel-good factor.

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, found that a massage after 70 minutes of workout by volunteers showed a marked increase in their muscle cells' energy production, and a decrease in inflammation in the cells.

For many years, people have gotten massages "without a huge amount of scientific underpinning," said study researcher Dr Mark Tarnopolsky, head of the division of neuromuscular and neurometabolic disease at McMaster.

"Our work raises the very interesting possibility that endurance exercise may be enhanced, or at least the benefits may be enhanced, for those who have a massage following their exercise," Tarnopolsky was quoted as saying by LiveScience.

In the research, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a group of participants had to exercise rigorously for about 70 minutes.    Then after a brief rest, they had one leg massaged while the other was not.

The researchers analysed tissue samples taken from the men's leg muscles shortly after the massage, and again after two and a half hours of rest, and compared them with samples they had taken from the participants after a previous, briefer workout.
They found two significant changes in the massaged muscles: a reduction in inflammation, and an increase in the production of mitochondria, which serve as an energy source in the body's cells.

"The mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, and increases of mitochondria are at the heart of the benefits of endurance exercise," Tarnopolsky said.

However, the researchers did not find any evidence of one often-touted benefit of massage. The massage had no effect on reducing lactic acid, which builds up in muscles during exercise, Tarnopolsky added.

"I think that this contributes to the growing body of thoughtful scientific work suggesting that massage itself, one, does have clear benefits and, two, there are ways that we can begin to discern the biology of why massage has those benefits," said Dr Mark Hyman Rapaport, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine.

"It's remarkable to me they're getting such profound effects with only 10 minutes of massage intervention," said Rapaport, who has studied the effects of massage for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Rapaport said future research should give a better idea of where massage may be a "biologically active" treatment, and could help with healing and athletic training.

But the new study suggests that "by getting a massage, the athletes are getting something that is decreasing inflammation and promoting a more positive feeling," he said.

One future research direction will be to examine the long-term effect of massage after a workout, he added.