Stretching Improves Flexibility, not Recovery
Another common recovery practice is post-exercise stretching to reduce soreness. However, stretching seems to have minimal impact on muscle recovery. One review showed that stretching reduced muscle soreness by 1-4 points on a 100-point scale. Another review found no improvement in strength recovery compared with simply resting.
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That doesn’t mean stretching has no value. Rod Turner, a primary care and sports medicine specialist at UTHealth Houston, says, “Stretching primarily enhances range of motion and flexibility, but has limited impact on the physiological pathways necessary for muscle recovery.” In other words, a few stretches after a workout are unlikely to prevent delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), or help the muscles recover faster.
High-Tech Treatments Have Limited Evidence
Oxygen is essential for muscle recovery processes such as ATP resynthesis, inflammation reduction, and satellite cell activation. Goldman says that muscle oxygen levels after hard exercise can be disrupted for several days. This makes the idea behind oxygen chambers (hyperbaric oxygen therapy or HBOT), which increases the partial pressure of oxygen within tissues, biologically plausible.
However, recent evidence suggests that oxygen therapy accelerates recovery from exercise-induced muscle injury but does not reduce DOMS.
“HBOT might be useful for faster ‘return-to-play,’ but for healthy people using it to manage simple post-workout aches, the evidence doesn’t support its use,” says Goldman.
“It’s important to point out that ‘muscle injury’ and ‘muscle soreness’ are often mixed up in wellness marketing for HBOT,” he adds. “They are not the same thing. DOMS is not an injury, and this confusion plays a major role in how these chambers are marketed.”
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Another high-tech recovery treatment is electromyostimulation (EMS), which uses electrical impulses to stimulate muscle contractions. While it may assist in post-exercise recovery, the strength of the findings is limited.
“There is little to no evidence supporting its use for reducing soreness or aiding recovery,” Turner says, “though one small trial suggested functional electrical stimulation may improve explosive power at 48 hours.”