Effect of sports massage on performance and recovery: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Massage is widely used by athletes, from elite competitors to weekend runners, yet whether it actually helps performance or recovery has rarely been tested systematically. This review pooled 29 randomised studies involving just over 1000 participants, comparing massage against other conditions across outcomes including strength, jump, sprint, endurance, fatigue, flexibility and muscle soreness after exercise. The broad result was that massage did not show evidence of improving strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance or fatigue. It was linked to small but statistically significant improvements in flexibility and in muscle soreness.

The main limitation is that these benefits were modest in size, and the review does not establish how clinically meaningful such small improvements are for athletes deciding whether to use massage in training or competition.

If you've ever wondered whether a sports massage actually makes you perform better or recover faster, this review looked at exactly that question. Researchers combined results from 29 studies involving just over 1000 people to see whether massage helped with things like strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance, tiredness, flexibility and muscle soreness after hard exercise. The pattern that emerged was that massage didn't show a clear benefit for strength, jumping, sprinting, endurance or fatigue.

It was linked to small improvements in flexibility and in muscle soreness afterward. These improvements were statistically real but modest, so the review doesn't tell us how much difference they'd actually make to how you feel or perform day to day.

The main thing to keep in mind is that the benefits detected were small, so this isn't strong evidence that massage transforms performance or recovery, just that it may offer limited help with soreness and flexibility specifically.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

For clinicians advising athletes on whether sports massage belongs in a recovery or performance programme, this meta-analysis pools 29 randomised studies (1012 participants) across multiple outcome domains, strength, jump, sprint, endurance, fatigue, flexibility and delayed onset muscle soreness, making it the largest synthesis of this evidence to date. The findings inform expectations around massage's direct performance effects: no evidence of benefit emerged for strength, jump, sprint, endurance or fatigue outcomes.

Small but statistically significant improvements were found for flexibility and for DOMS, which may be relevant to recovery-focused rather than performance-focused goals, though the effect sizes were small and their clinical meaningfulness is not established by this review. What this does not establish is whether massage adds meaningful value when layered onto other recovery strategies, how protocols (duration, technique, timing) might modify effects, or how findings generalise across different sports and athlete populations, since the abstract does not detail heterogeneity or risk-of-bias specifics for individual included trials. Clinicians should weigh these small, isolated improvements against the absence of any detected performance benefit when interpreting the overall evidence base.