A massage proven best medicine

A massage after vigorous exercise unquestionably feels good, and it seems to reduce pain and help muscles recover.

Many people — both athletes and health professionals — have long contended it eases inflammation, improves blood flow and reduces muscle tightness. But, until now it has never been understood why a massage has this apparently beneficial effect.

Now, researchers have found out what happens to muscles when a masseur goes to work on them.

Their experiment required having people exercise to exhaustion and then undergo five incisions in their legs to obtain muscle tissue, which was then analysed. Despite the hurdles, the scientists still managed to find 11 brave young male volunteers. The study was published in the February 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

The biopsy

During the first visit, they biopsied the leg of each volunteer as they rested. At the second session, they had them vigorously exercise on a stationary bicycle for more than an hour until they could go no further. Then, they massaged one thigh of each subject for 10 minutes, leaving the other thigh to recover on its own.

Immediately after the massage, they biopsied the thigh muscle in each leg again. After allowing another two-and-a-half hours of rest, they did a third biopsy to track the process of muscle injury and repair.

Vigorous exercise causes tiny tears in muscle fibres, leading to an immune reaction — inflammation — as the body gets to work repairing the injured cells. So, the researchers screened the tissue from the massaged and unmassaged legs to compare their repair processes, and to find out what difference a massage would make.

They found that a massage reduced the production of compounds called cytokines, which play a critical role in inflammation. A massage also stimulates mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside cell nuclei that convert glucose into energy, which is essential for cell function and repair.

“The bottom line is that there appears to be a suppression of pathways in inflammation and an increase in mitochondrial biogenesis,” helping the muscle adapt to the demands of increased exercise, said senior author, Mark A. Tarnopolsky.

Dr Tarnopolsky, a professor of paediatrics and medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said that a massage works quite differently from Nsaids and other anti-inflammatory drugs, which reduce inflammation and pain but may actually retard healing.

Many people, for instance, take an aspirin or Aleve at the first sign of muscle soreness. “There’s some theoretical concern that there is a maladaptive response in the long run if you’re constantly suppressing inflammation with drugs,” he said. “With a massage you can suppress inflammation and actually enhance cell recovery,” said Dr Tarnopolsky.

Important findings

“This is important research, because it is the first to show that a massage can reduce pro-inflammatory cytokines, which may be involved in pain,” said Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Medical School.

“We have known from many studies that pain can be reduced by a massage based on self-report, but this is the first demonstration that the pain-related pro-inflammatory cytokines can be reduced,” she said, although she was not involved in the study.