Foam rollers, massage guns and balls, stretch straps, heat and ice wraps, compression boots and vibration plates: small, short-lived effects on soreness and stiffness.
Recovery tools promise to ease soreness and stiffness between sessions. Foam rollers, roller sticks and massage balls are for self-massage, and massage guns do the same with rapid percussion. Stretch straps help with stretching, heat and ice wraps treat local aches, pneumatic compression boots squeeze the legs in cycles, and vibration plates shake your whole body while you stand on them.
They can make you feel looser and less sore for a while. What actually drives recovery and adaptation is sleep, food and a sensible training load, and these tools come a long way behind those.
Meta-analyses find small, short-lived effects. Foam rolling before exercise slightly improves flexibility and sprint performance; after exercise it modestly reduces how sore you feel. A 2026 meta-analysis of 12 trials of massage guns found no clear benefit for soreness or strength recovery. Most studies are small, unblinded and short, and none show faster long-term progress. In one trial, regular cold-water immersion after lifting reduced strength and muscle gains.
Across 21 studies, foam rolling before exercise slightly improved sprint performance (+0.7%) and flexibility (+4%). After exercise it slightly reduced soreness and loss of performance. The authors judged the effects minor, and better suited to warm-ups than recovery.
Across 12 randomized trials of percussive (massage gun) therapy after muscle-damaging exercise, there was a possible benefit for recovery of jump performance (low certainty) but no clear effect on recovery of strength or on muscle soreness.
21 active men strength-trained for 12 weeks with either 10 minutes of cold-water immersion or an active cool-down after each session. The cold-water group gained less strength and muscle.
In randomized trials in postmenopausal women, whole-body vibration improved lumbar spine bone density. The evidence was high quality only for high frequency (about 30 Hz), low magnitude (about 0.3 g) and long total use (about 7,000 minutes).