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Athletes are known to massage sore muscles after intense training. During exercise, muscles get damaged and inflamed and when the muscles repair themselves, theyll often also get bigger and stronger. Researchers are looking to the mechanisms by which massage after exercise actually works to help muscle regeneration and recovery.

In a new study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a group of researchers looks at how massage, or mechanotherapy, works in the leg muscles of mice. Lots of people have been trying to study the beneficial effects of massage and other mechanotherapies on the body, but up to this point it hadn't been done in a systematic, reproducible way, says first author on the study Bo Ri Seo, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the research group of Dave Mooney at the Wyss Institute and SEAS in a press release. Our work shows a very clear connection between mechanical stimulation and immune function. This has promise for regenerating a wide variety of tissues including bone, tendon, hair, and skin, and can also be used in patients with diseases that prevent the use of drug-based interventions.

Previous work by the group found that mechanotherapy helped with muscle regeneration and reduced tissue scarring in several studies in mice. They wanted to know more about how this actually works so they set up a new experiment where they could monitor the muscle tissues post massage.

They used a custom designed robotic system to massage the legs of mice in an experiment. They could also control how much force was being applied during the massage. The team then looked at what happened in the tissues following two weeks of massages.

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The researchers analyzed several inflammation-related factors called cytokines in the muscles of treated and untreated mice. They found that the subset of cytokines was much lower in the mice that got treated with massages. These mice also had lower levels of neutrophils, which are immune cells that play a role in the inflammation process.

Neutrophils are known to kill and clear out pathogens and damaged tissue, but in this study we identified their direct impacts on muscle progenitor cell behaviors, says co-second author Stephanie McNamara, a former Post-Graduate Fellow at the Wyss Institute who is now an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Harvard Medical School (HMS), in the press release. While the inflammatory response is important for regeneration in the initial stages of healing, it is equally important that inflammation is quickly resolved to enable the regenerative processes to run its full course.

The group also examined whether massage had an effect on the type of muscle fibers that developed, and found that a specific type of fiber was more prevalent in treated mice that helped them to be stronger.

This research could also have implications for immunotherapy, the authors suggest. The idea that mechanics influence cell and tissue function was ridiculed until the last few decades, and while scientists have made great strides in establishing acceptance of this fact, we still know very little about how that process actually works at the organ level, says Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber in the press release. This research has revealed a previously unknown type of interplay between mechanobiology and immunology that is critical for muscle tissue healing, in addition to describing a new form of mechanotherapy that potentially could be as potent as chemical or gene therapies, but much simpler and less invasive.

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Massage helps muscles heal faster and stronger. Here's why. | TheHill - The Hill