10 Reasons to Invest in a Massage Gun

Massage guns, also known as percussive therapy guns, are a must for anyone looking to optimize their overall health and wellness. Initially developed for, and accessible to, only the top athletes, massage guns are now being adopted by the broader fitness community as well as anyone looking to create or maintain a healthier lifestyle.

Professional massages are wonderful. They are also time-consuming and costly. Massage guns have made massages and percussive therapy accessible to everyone. At-home massage gun and percussive therapy supports overall health and wellness through its immediate and long-term benefits.

Below are 10 ways percussive therapy supercharges your body’s performance and enhances recovery efforts.

1. Improved Circulation – Massage guns and percussive therapy help support overall recovery by improving circulation. Use of a massage gun on a targeted area of the body stimulates local blood flow to the area, enhancing circulation locally and throughout the body. By increasing circulation, oxygen-rich blood and other nutrients are delivered to the targeted muscle tissue and throughout the body. The body’s waste product removal system also kicks into high gear, which helps promote local tissue repair and efficient muscle function and recovery. This local repair mechanism speeds the healing process after training or injury, as well as signals the rest of the body to continue this pattern of enhanced circulation and waste product removal. The local stimulation ultimately benefits the whole body’s circulatory system.

2. Fascia Benefits – Percussion therapy thins the body’s muscle-connecting fascia, leading to increased pliability. Fascia is the body’s thin layer of connective tissue that runs throughout the body. Fascia surrounds and connects and holds in place the body’s organs, blood vessels, bones, nerves, and muscles. The tissue itself has nerves, not too dissimilar from skin. Fascia also has nerves in, like skin. When fascia is stressed – from life, physical activity, etc. – it tightens up. Because it has nerves in it, we feel that tightness.

Fascia runs throughout the body and is entirely connected. Meaning tight fascia can cause havoc throughout your body. Tight muscles often are due to thick or tight fascia, which often occurs from prolonged periods of repetitive movement or low-activity levels, and results in low-mobility and tighter muscles and tendons. Because fascia is whole-body connected and runs throughout your body, tight lower-body fascia can cause issues locally and elsewhere in your body – for example – when tight hamstrings are effecting your lower or mid-back, fascia is often to blame. Percussive massages can help thin out tight or thickened fascia. As fascial tissue thins through massage therapy, muscle mobility, joint and tendon pliability, and overall range of motion increases.

3. Tension Reduction – Percussive therapy, like that derived from massage guns, helps relieve muscle tension and promotes muscle relaxation by elongating muscle fibers and stimulating nerve endings in the focus area. Muscle tension after sleeping, sitting in a desk all day, or performing repetitive tasks is common. Tight shoulders, backs, and hamstrings are common ailments of those spending the better part of their weeks in an office. The high intensity stimulus in a tight muscle reflexively causes a reduction in muscle tension. Relief of tension and the related knots helps support increases in range of motion locally and throughout the body.

4. Pain Relief

• DOMS – Acute aches and pains caused by delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), as well as chronic aches caused by joint discomfort or other ailments are frustrating at best, and debilitating at worst. We’ve all had the experience of being so sore that it makes you nauseous. DOMS, the typical pain, soreness or discomfort often felt 24-72 hours after unfamiliar or intense physical activity, can be reduced or even alleviated using a low-frequency massage gun.
• “Lactic Acid” – There is a common belief that massages or percussion therapy help shuttle away lactic acid out of our muscles. While it is a convenient explanation for soreness, lactic acid is not the culprit for soreness. Lactate is actually present in muscles to help buffer acidity or the “burn” felt while undergoing intense exercise. As muscles burn energy and oxygen, and the “burn” sets in, lactate is shuttled to our muscles to help buffer the acidity created by a lack of oxygen in the muscles. After the lactate is used, our muscles very quickly clear away lactate; by the time you are ready for a massage or ready to use a massage gun, the lactate is likely already cleared away from the muscle. However, the mechanism that does relieve muscle soreness is actually the massage gun helping us activate the parasympathetic or “rest state” of our central nervous system, which gets us into a state of relaxation, which is required for muscle repair.
• Swelling, inflammation and muscle cramps, a natural response to muscle trauma experienced in an intense training session or an injury, are often accompanied by aches and pain. Percussive therapy can help reduce swelling and inflammation, which kickstarts the repair process. Additionally, the repetitive, high-frequency pulses of a massage gun can help temporarily interrupt the pain frequencies transmitted from the nerves in the affected area to the brain, resulting in temporary relief while the muscle continues its repair. As a result, percussive therapy can act as a substitute or alternative to pain relivers or other pain medications.

Keep in mind that while decreasing the swelling in the affected area is the goal for muscle repair, if you are training for hypertrophy or muscle growth, immediate massage therapy is not advised as it may short circuit the muscle growth process – as some level of inflammation post-workout is required for the muscle’s repair and growth mechanism. See the Cold Plunge for Beginners post for more information on protocols that may inadvertently limit hypertrophy efforts.

5. Increased Focus – Percussive therapy an enhance mental focus. You may have experienced the mental fog that can accompany excessive soreness. When it hurts to turn around in a chair, it is exceedingly difficult to focus on mentally taxing work. Thus, by helping limit soreness, aches, and pain, your at-home massage gun protocol can also make you more efficient and effective at work. By not focusing on the pain, you can free up mental capacity to focus on what really matters.

Additionally, just like a professional massage can promote relaxation, using a massage gun correctly can relax your body and mind, which can help alleviate stress and anxiety via the release endorphins and the feel-good hormones dopamine and serotonin. Further, by keeping your body’s autonomic nervous system in a state of parasympathetic rest longer through continued use of percussive therapy, you’ll give yourself a better chance at prolonged deep sleep each night, which further reduces stress and anxiety.

6. Boost Your Immunity – Routine use of a massage run may strengthen immunity and improve immune response. The lymphatic system is responsible for keeping us healthy – the system is complementary to the circulation system and is a critical component of our overall immune system, and it protects us from infections. Percussive therapy is thought to stimulate the lymphatic system and give the system a boost in clearing away toxins and supporting the overall immune system. While research is still ongoing, activation of the lymphatic system may help with overall immunity given the benefits of increased circulation and lymphatic movement.

7. Sleep – Percussive therapy helps optimize sleep and enhance time asleep. Use of a massage gun or percussive massage therapy can help relax the autonomic nervous system, promoting increases in REM sleep, the memory-consolidation phase of sleep, and slow wave sleep (SWS), the repair and regenerative phase of sleep. During SWS, our muscles and tissue are repaired, and the immune system is strengthened. Additionally, while the physical percussive therapy can help support entering into and staying in these deep sleep phases, building a bedtime routine of using your massage gun right before bed can help build and reinforce your bed time ritual which will further promote efficient sleep as a signal to your brain that it is time to wind down and enter these stages of sleep.

8. Muscle Readiness – Massage guns can aid in preparing muscles for work. Utilizing a massage gun prior to training is a great way to send a signal to your muscles that its time to get ready to perform. By warming up a targeted body part, or your whole body in general, prior to a training session, you’ll increase muscle temperature which leads to increased flexibility and pliability. This can be an effective warmup, when used properly, as you’ll increase the oxygen supply in the muscle group and enhance muscle and tendon elasticity. The more available oxygen in the muscle group, the better the muscle will perform and the greater the load it can handle. By pairing 30-60 seconds of percussive therapy with dynamic stretching or mobility warmups, you’ll give your muscles the greatest opportunity to perform.

9. Injury Prevention – Percussion therapy can help reduce the risk of injury. Injuries often occur because we recruit our bodies to perform an activity prior to being appropriately warmed up. The right warmup protocol can signal your muscles to prepare for work, and can also improve the range of motion of the target area, further reducing the risk of injury. By pairing a warmup with a quick massage gun protocol, you can limit your chance of injury.

10. Muscle Growth – Using a massage gun over time will help promote muscle growth. While the massage gun itself will not cause muscle growth, the certain mechanisms that percussive therapy prompts will lead to muscle growth over time.

Massage guns can aid in improving body awareness, or the mind-muscle connection. By stimulating specific muscles, you can increase the mind-muscle connection. If you have areas of the body that you cannot flex, you will not be able to grow meaningful muscle there. By targeting specific areas of the body, you can help develop that connection which will ultimately lay the foundation for future muscle growth or muscle performance, and ultimately, athletic performance.

Utilizing a massage gun to dial in sleep will enable longer stretches of slow-wave sleep, and more opportunity for muscle growth and recovery.

By increasing blood and nutrient circulation, lengthening muscle fibers, keeping fascia pliable, improving recovery time, and staying healthy, the body has the best opportunity to train consistently over a prolonged period of time. Fitness is achieved through consistency, not intensity. The only way to be consistent is to be healthy and avoid injuries, and doing so will result in the body’s ability to sustain more load over time, promoting fitness gains.

By shortening recovery time, muscles will heal and grow faster, reducing down time between training sessions and creating more opportunities to train.

It is important to develop a deliberate and mindful practice.

Massage gun practices and percussive therapy continue to gain in popularity and may make sense to incorporate into your health and fitness journey. While the benefits of percussive therapy and massage guns are countless, you do need to be careful when using the protocol and should always consult a physician before beginning any fitness or training regime. It’s important to be intentional with your protocol and be mindful of where you are using the massage gun.

Generally, you can benefit from percussive therapy in as little as 15-30 seconds on an affected area, and experts recommend avoiding covering the same area for more than two minutes. Be fluid with the practice rather than staying in one static spot – cover a wider range of the affected muscle for the best results.

Never use a massage gun above your neck and keep it away from your spine. Do not use a massage gun near bone, on joints, sprains, on open wounds, or near other acute injury spots as doing so risks aggravating your existing injuries and slowing the healing process. Use the gun on soft tissue only to avoid doing any damage to bones or joints. Additionally, let the gun add the pressure, there is no need to add any extra pressure.