How do you placebo-proof a massage study? That's the big question for anyone trying to figure out exactly how (and if) massage helps to speed recovery after hard workouts. One solution that a group at Ohio State has adopted is to use rabbits as your subjects -- presumably they don't realize that their rub-down is supposed to make them feel better. I wrote about the group's first study way back in 2008, which offered initial evidence that the rabbits did indeed recover more quickly after massage. Their most recent study, just published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, tackles the question of when massage is most effective.

The rabbit protocol is highly standardized: the "exercise" consists of eccentric muscle contractions of the hind leg stimulated by electrical impulse, and the "massage" is actually "massage-like compressive loading" administered by a machine. In the new study, the rabbits received four consecutive days of 15-minute massages starting either immediately after the hard exercise sessions, or 48 hours after.

Here's the simplest-to-parse result; "recovery index" is a measure of how much their strength returned by the end of the recovery protocol:

Pretty clear-cut: the group that got massage immediately after recovered more fully than the group the got delayed massage, and they both outdid the control group that got no massage.

Here's a slightly more complicated picture, with the same message. This graph shows how much torque the rabbits could produce at 21 different joint angles.

The pre-exercise curve is (equal) highest; the post-exercise curve is lowest. The control group that didn't get massage basically doesn't change from the post-exercise; the group that got delayed massage is pretty much right in the middle; and the group that got immediate massage essentially returns all the way to the starting values.

There's lots of discussion (but no conclusive answers) about what's going on here. The main theory is essentially that hard or prolonged exercise damages your muscles; your body's repair systems send a bunch of repair cells that have the secondary effect of triggering inflammation, which in turn spurs more damage, leading to soreness a day or two later. Massage seems to limit that inflammatory response; in support of that idea, the study found that the massaged group had the least inflammation (by measuring muscle mass) and the lowest levels of inflammatory cells.

The takeaway? Well, the obvious one is that more research is needed, including human studies. In the meantime, this seems to suggest that if you get massage and don't have unlimited time and money, you should try to schedule your massages on the day of your hardest or longest workouts.

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