Massage after exercise myth busted?

You know the long-held belief that massage after exercise increases blood flow and reduces lactic acid, thus making your muscles hurt less afterward?

Apparently, it’s a myth. There are no scientific studies showing that massage improves blood flow and leads to a reduction in lactic acid (I looked, and so did the researchers of the study). It’s not that massage is bad for you, it’s that compressing a muscle apparently restricts blood flow rather than facilitate it.

According to researchers:

A Queen’s University research team has blown open the myth that massage after exercise improves circulation to the muscle and assists in the removal of lactic acid and other waste products.

“This dispels a common belief in the general public about the way in which massage is beneficial,” says Kinesiology and Health Studies professor Michael Tschakovsky. “It also dispels that belief among people in the physical therapy profession. All the physical therapy professionals that I have talked to, when asked what massage does, answer that it improves muscle blood flow and helps get rid of lactic acid. Ours is the first study to challenge this and rigorously test its validity.”

The belief that massage aids in the removal of lactic acid from muscle tissue is so pervasive it is even listed on the Canadian Sports Massage Therapists website as one of the benefits of massage, despite there being absolutely no scientific research to back this up.

Kinesiology MSc candidate Vicky Wiltshire and Dr. Tschakovsky set out to discover if this untested hypothesis was true, 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.

I want to be incredulous to this information because to me, it makes sense that massage would help increase blood flow – after all, by compressing the blood out of a muscle, you’re pushing it somewhere, and once you stop compressing the muscle, blood will fill the capillaries back up. Then again, if you’ve got a series of airtight hoses trickling water, will squeezing one of the hoses repeatedly cause more water to flow through that hose? Perhaps not. Aside from this, the circulatory system is a closed one, so increased blood flow in one area will lead to decreased blood flow in other areas, barring an increase in heart rate and thus an increase in flow rate of the whole system.

This is the first study to actually look at blood flow and lactic acid and the role massage plays in these two elements of muscle, so repeated studies are definitely in order.