http://www6.miami.edu/touch-research/TRIResearch/massageres.htm

Lots of positive results, maybe not fitting these categories exactly but including pain relief. A quick “Google Scholar” search for massage and pain relief also seems to yield respectable research papers with positive implications (can’t open most due to access issues). A search for massage and blood flow does not yield anything positive that I could see. (I had thought that massage helped with the local capillaries, if not systemic blood flow, yet the few papers I saw seem to agree with the above that massage may be detrimental to recovery after exercise.)

If this is true, though, why do so many athletes continue to receive massage and believe it to help them? Why do elite athletes have a trainer by their side? Something else positive must be happening. The researchers from this book were, perhaps, asking the wrong questions?

will keep looking. . .