Massage Guns - Are they useful?
The explosion in popularity of massage guns has become omnipresent over the last few years. A lot of this has been driven by the influencer age, with top athletes being sponsored by massage gun manufacturing companies. It becomes appealing to active individuals as it is marketed as a means of passive recovery, so you don’t have to use much energy to use one. However, what do massage guns actually do? The answer – unfortunately not much.
Massage guns are hand-held devices which use percussion therapy as a means of treatment. A quick Google search will give you a long list of proposed benefits of using massage guns by some multi-millionaire companies. Let’s delve a little deeper into some of these proposed benefits.
Massage guns are proposed to:
Reduce stress and anxiety
Improve blood and lymph circulation, increasing oxygen and nutrient supply to muscles
To encourage healing of atrophied muscles, to promote faster healing
Improve flexibility and mobility
Reduce delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS)
Reduce lactic acid build up
Breaks up scar tissue
Reduce the risk of muscle sprains/strains
Improve sleep and immunity
The research is very limited in proving any of these claims, however, many people do find that they gain temporary muscle soreness relief, and an increase in their ability to train due to ‘feeling’ a bit more range of motion around a certain joint.
What Can I Do Instead of using a massage gun?
There are numerous other things you can do if you wish to improve your warm-up, recovery or overall wellbeing.
For your warm-up, focus on increasing your heart rate, dynamic flexibility and bringing your joints through the ranges you are going to use them in during your workout.
For recovery, you should aim to really focus on the low hanging fruit here – sleep, nutrition, hydration and load management. If you are someone who only sleeps 5 hours per night and has a poor diet, this is something you should focus on addressing, before looking externally to invest in a product to aid your recovery.
In terms of wellness, even just going for a simple walk outdoors would tick a lot more of the boxes than a massage gun for the claims they make. Other options here which are completely cost-free and have much more science-backed positive effects include: mediation, journaling, spending time with loved ones, and doing things which are meaningful to you.
Conclusion
The likelihood is that investing in a massage gun will not bring any benefit to your recovery, performance, or overall wellbeing. However, if money is not an issue for you and you already have all the key pillars of recovery nailed and you just want to use a massage gun because you think it feels good or you find it relaxing – then go for it.
If you have any questions on whether physio is the best option for you, or you have any questions about MVMNT in general, feel free to contact via email.
- Jay Towolawi, Specialist Sports Physiotherapist and MVMNT Founder.