Stretching Improves Flexibility, not Recovery<\/p>\n
Another common recovery practice is post-exercise stretching to reduce soreness. However, stretching seems to have minimal impact on muscle recovery. One review<\/a> showed that stretching reduced muscle soreness by 1-4 points on a 100-point scale. Another review<\/a> found no improvement in strength recovery compared with simply resting.<\/p>\n (You might be stretching the wrong way, scientists say<\/a>.)<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean stretching has no value. Rod Turner<\/a>, a primary care and sports medicine specialist at UTHealth Houston, says, \u201cStretching primarily enhances range of motion and flexibility, but has limited impact on the physiological pathways necessary for muscle recovery.\u201d In other words, a few stretches after a workout are unlikely to prevent delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), or help the muscles recover faster.<\/p>\n High-Tech Treatments Have Limited Evidence<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n However, recent evidence<\/a> suggests that oxygen therapy accelerates recovery from exercise-induced muscle injury but does not reduce DOMS.<\/p>\n \u201cHBOT might be useful for faster \u2018return-to-play,\u2019 but for healthy people using it to manage simple post-workout aches, the evidence doesn\u2019t support its use,\u201d says Goldman.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to point out that \u2018muscle injury\u2019 and ‘muscle soreness\u2019 are often mixed up in wellness marketing for HBOT,\u201d he adds. \u201cThey are not the same thing. DOMS is not an injury, and this confusion plays a major role in how these chambers are marketed.\u201d<\/p>\n (From inflammation to depression, electricity is transforming medicine<\/a>.)<\/p>\n