Massage Guns Are a Fitness Staple—but Do They Actually Deliver?

You’d be hard-pressed to walk into a gym without seeing someone trying to fix their sore muscles. One guy’s foam rolling his calves like his life depends on it, someone else is aggressively stretching their shoulders with a resistance band, and in the back, yep, that’s a guy mid-cold plunge looking like he regrets all of his life choices. 

From high-tech massage tools to compression boots that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie, the recovery market is overflowing with gadgets that promise to beat soreness and speed up your bounce-back. But just because your favorite gym bro swears by it doesn’t mean it actually works—or is worth your hard-earned cash. Case in point: massage guns. A new study suggests they might be more hype than help.

The study published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research followed 20 healthy, active adults as they did an intense biceps workout with their non-dominant arm designed to create soreness and muscle damage.

Related: 5 Science-Backed Reasons Your Chest Won’t Grow

The participants were then broken up into two groups: the group that used a massage gun and the group that didn’t do any kind of recovery treatment. The massage gun group used the recovery tool for five minutes right after the workout, then again at 24 and 48 hours later. 

For the next week, the researchers tracked how sore each participant's arms felt, how much their range of motion changed, how swollen their muscles were, how strong they stayed, and how well their muscles fired.

The results? Everyone got sore, and everyone recovered to the same extent, whether they used the massage gun or not. That means the massage guns didn’t reduce soreness, improve strength, or speed up recovery any more than doing nothing at all.

This study challenges the widely held belief that massage guns are an effective tool for muscle recovery and soreness relief. While they might feel good in the moment (which is a perfectly valid reason to use them), the findings suggest they don’t actually help you bounce back any faster after a tough workout.