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Researchers at McMaster University recently discovered a 10-minute massage can help reduce inflammation in muscles, helping patients to recover from strenuous work or injury.

Justin Crane, a researcher from the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University, said the non-drug therapy could help athletes cope with injuries or chronic conditions that result in inflammation, such as arthritis or muscular dystrophy. Currently, massage therapy is widely accepted as a method of relieving muscle tension and pain.

The researchers hypothesize that massage therapy could also trigger biochemical sensors that send inflammation reducing signals to muscle cells resulting in a healing response. Massage signals were also found to build more mitochondria in muscle cells, which power the center of cells and further enhance the recovery process in muscle tissue.

"The main thing, and what is novel about our study, is that no one has ever looked inside the muscle to see what is happening with massage, no one looked at the biochemical effects or what might be going on in the muscle itself," Crane said .

According to the study, the muscle senses that it is being stretched during a massage which reduces the cells' inflammatory response. Thus, massage therapy could prove to be a vital tool in the recovery of muscle tissue after an injury. This study is the first time researchers have tested the effect of a manual therapy on a muscle tissue to reduce inflammation, an underlying cause of many chronic diseases.

In the study, the researchers followed 11 men in their twenties, assessing their exercise capacity, putting them through rigorous activities and then resting them for 10 minutes. While resting, a massage therapist applied massage oil to both legs and performed a 10-minute massage on one leg of the participants. The leg received a variety of massage techniques commonly used as rehabilitation tools. The other leg received no massage to act as a control group.

Then, researchers performed biopsies on both legs and repeated the test 2.5 hours later. Inflammation in the massaged leg was significantly lower than in the control group leg. Crane and colleagues were shocked at how effective a simple 10-minute massage was in reducing the muscular inflammation.

"I didn't think that little bit of massage could produce that remarkable of a change, especially since the exercise was so robust," Crane said. "Seventy minutes of exercise compared to 10 of massage, it is clearly potent."

The results of the study suggest that massage therapy mutes muscle pain in the same biological mechanism as most pain medications with less side effects, thus offering an alternative to drug pain relievers. However, Crane did discover that massage therapy did not clear lactic acid from tired, sore muscles - a common misconception.

In an interview with WebMD, Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of pediatrics at McMaster University, said massage therapy could help athletes starting an endurance training program to double the volume of the mitochondria in the muscle, depending on the frequency and intensity of the training. The more mitochondria active in the muscle cells, the more oxygen can be extracted to help the tissue grow. Massage therapy seems to be enhancing this pathway for the mitochondria. Therefore, massage therapy could be beneficial for both muscle recovery and growth.