Blood Flow and Muscle Soreness Improve with Massage Therapy

Muscle tightness can cause soreness, stress, and poor blood flow throughout the body. It's important to take care of these tissues, especially after athletic activity, and massage therapy proves to be effective in doing so.

"Massage" is a general term for pressing, rubbing, and manipulating your skin, muscles, tendons, and ligaments, which can vary from light stroking to deep pressure, according to the Mayo Clinic. This alternative and natural medicine can help improve important aspects that are essential in bodily function.

According to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, massage therapy benefits people of all ages regardless of their physical activity because its benefits include relief of muscle soreness and improved circulation, which both help lower stress. Their study was published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

The study featured two groups of participants: healthy sedentary adults and exercising adults. Each person was asked to rate their muscle soreness on a scale from 1 to 10 after using a leg press machine, with half of the participants receiving Swedish leg massages. Those who received the massage after their workout did not experience any muscle soreness after 90 minutes, but those who were not massaged reported soreness in excess of 24 hours.

Additionally, the exercise-only group saw their blood flow return to normal after 72 hours, whereas the exercise-and-massage group had improved blood flow until the 72 hour mark, where it returned back to its normal state. And although this was all the study examined, massage therapy provides many more benefits. You can read about them in this Huffington Post article as well as this WebMD article.

"We believe that massage is really changing physiology in a positive way," said Nina Cherie Franklin, the first author of the study, in this EurekAlert! news release. "This is not just blood flow speeds-this is actually a vascular response."

Massages and massage therapy can be beneficial, but there are risks for people who have bleeding disorders, deep vein thrombosis, osteoporosis, thrombocytopenia, and other conditions. It's recommended that you start with a light massage technique before moving on to the more deep tissue ones.

You can read more about massage therapy on the Mayo Clinic website.