RESEARCH REVIEW

Research Review – Dr Zoë Hudson

This issue’s chosen research theme is massage, mainly because it’s a tool that many health care professionals involved in sport use on a regular basis. Massage is one of the oldest treatment tools around and has been used for hundreds of years, however, debate regarding the efficacy of mas- sage and when it should be used is ongoing. When it comes to the sport- ing context, the debate surrounds pre- competition/training preparation and post-competition/training recovery and its role in injury management and injury prevention.

Several articles have been published recently which contribute to the debate, it therefore seemed timely to revisit this area and review some of the latest literature. Prior to establishing the impact of any new research, it is always useful to establish the current situation so I have purposely selected a review article as well as recent original research to put this into context.

The mechanisms of massage and effects on performance, muscle recovery and injury prevention P Weerapong, PA Hume, GS Kolt Sports Medicine 2005;35:235-256

Sports Medicine is a well established journal that publishes review articles

TABLE 1 Biomechanical Physiological

and this paper presents an excellent overview to date of research in classic Western or Swedish-type massage tech- niques. The authors explore in depth the theoretical effects of massage (biome- chanical, physiological, neurological and psychological) and present a good review for those newer to massage, or those wanting a refresher. The authors then go on to present the evidence to date in each of these fields, for example, biomechani- cal effects are discussed under muscle tendon-unit compliance and subdivided into three sections – dynamic passive stiffness, dynamic active stiffness, and joint ROM. While stiffness is a relatively new concept in this field, there is surpris- ingly little evidence for the biomechanical effects. Table 1 shows how the authors present the potential effects of massage.

Evidence of the positive psychological effects with regards to relaxation and per- ceived recovery from fatigue are present- ed. Interestingly no research has been done that compares perceived recovery and physiological markers of fatigue.

The last section focuses on the evidence for massage on performance, recovery and prevention of muscle injury and is likely to be of most interest to the readers of sportEX. The evidence is limited with respect to the effect on performance. On the recovery side, cool down has been

POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF MASSAGE Neurological

Passive stiffness Skin and muscle Neuromuscular temperature

Active stiffness Blood flow Joint ROM Hormones

excitability and the H reflex

Pain and muscle spasm

Relaxation Recovery from

parasympathetic fatigue activity

4

Psychological Anxiety

shown to be more effective than massage for increasing the rate of blood lactate removal after intense exercise. However, no studies have compared the psycholog- ical effects of massage and cool down. On the prevention side, the psychological benefit of massage for athletes between events is fairly well proven. Additionally, massage has been shown to reduce the sensation of DOMS but to date it has not been shown to prevent any functional muscle loss.

While any review draws the reader to the limitations of the evidence, I would prefer to look at where the gaps are rather than where the holes have tried to be filled. It is clear from this review that there are many areas still to be evaluated and the authors present a summary of where future research should be directed. This is a well written, easy to follow review and summary tables of the evidence are pro- vided for each parameter discussed and clinicians will find these a very quick and useful reference point.

Mood state response to massage and subsequent exercise performance D Micklewright, M Griffin, V Gladwell, R Beneke Sports Psychologist 2005;19:234 -250

There is an increasing interest in the lit- erature in the relationship between an athlete’s mood state and performance, and this article investigates this in rela- tion to massage as an intervention. Previous studies on the effect of massage on performance have looked at factors such as strength or stride frequencies as indicators of performance (Weerapong et al, 2005). This study employs an anaero- bic indicator of performance, namely a 30 second Wingate cycling test.

Sixteen physically active undergraduate university students were randomly

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