Massage as Recovery Strategy After Resistance Training

Within the routine of resistance training, stimulus are implemented to meet predetermined goals for its practitioners. In order for there to be a balance in the imposed loads, a recovery period is necessary for supercompensation to occur. Recovery is a multifactorial process and to consider an individual recovered it is necessary to respect the integration of physiological, biomechanical and psychological factors, in addition, perceptual markers, which are not widely investigated in the literature, seem to be effective recovery markers. Massage is a technique that stands out for its wide use after physical exercise in order to help accelerate the recovery process. In the literature, studies that investigated the influence of massage on performance did not find positive results and some authors question the real need to apply the technique to aid recovery. However, in the perceptual parameters, massage seems to have a good influence, such as pain reduction, perception of fatigue and improvement in the perception of recovery. Thus, understanding the experience that massage can provide during a training period can be an important outcome along with variables already used. The hypothesis of this study is that massage will improve perceptual parameters over a training period and, consequently, will improve the experience between training sessions without positively or negatively interfering in performance.