A lot of athletes these days seem to be wearing compression garments on the lower limb. When you ask them ‘why exactly are you wearing this?’ most reply with ‘it helps me perform better! I really notice a difference’
The fact is most scientific literature surrounding this topic of compression garments and performance, have concluded that they have no statistically significant effect.
So, should I bin my compression garments?
The scientific community may not have found a performance increase when using compression garments, but what they have found is that the garments can help in recovery and reduced delayed onset muscle soreness aka DOMS.
The science behind DOMS is still unclear, some theorise that it results from disruption to the muscle fibre and connective tissue and others state that it relates more to the inflammatory response.
How compression garments aid recovery:
- Although speculative, the proposed reason for compression garments helping with DOMS is that the pressure applied by the garments reduces the space the muscles and local tissue has to swell during the inflammatory response lessening the experience of pain.
- The second reason reported by the studies is that the use of the garment dynamically immobilises the area. This enhances the neural input speeding up the recovery time.
- The third reason these garments can help with muscle recovery is due to creatine kinase. This has been used extensively in the scientific community as a marker for muscle damage as it is closely linked with DOMS. The garment is said to act like a pumping mechanism much like sports massage, and help the clearance of metabolites such as CK in turn reducing DOMS.
What needs to be noted is that the paper by Hill, J., Howatson, G., Van Someren, K., Leeder, J., & Pedlar, C. (2014). Compression garments and recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage: a meta-analysis. British journal of sports medicine, 48(18), 1340-1346. they compared a multitude of research papers and there are a few limitations, these being:
- Small sample sizes
- The subjects knew what treatment they were getting meaning placebo effect can’t be ruled out
- The studies have not mention how groups were randomised
- Garments were used on upper and lower body as well as using different manufacturers
- Lastly garments are fitted on height and weight. As people are different shapes it means there maybe difference in pressure exerted.