Percussive Massage (Massage Gun)
Acute ROM & stiffness effects
Key Findings
Title (verified against the DOI record): acute effects of static stretching vs percussive massage on range of motion and passive stiffness — Fukaya, Morishita, Yokoi, Nakamura, 2026
The entry's original claims — percussive massage acutely increases ROM and lowers passive stiffness comparably to static stretching, without static stretching's acute strength/power loss; the effect is acute; the mechanism is neuromuscular plus blood flow — could NOT be checked against the abstract in this pass (source not verified). Treat them as the base's reading of the title and of the wider percussion literature, not as confirmed results of this paper
Nakamura's group has published several acute stretching-vs-massage comparisons; that is why the direction (both increase ROM) is plausible — plausibility, not verification
Practical Application
Source not verified: this 2026 paper compares static stretching with percussive massage for acute range of motion and passive stiffness; its results, sample and effect sizes could not be read for this check. What the base can say: percussive massage is used as a pre-training mobility tool (↑ROM) — whether it matches static stretching here is unconfirmed
Recovery: the evidence for percussion as a recovery aid is weaker than for massage (REF-385 meta-analysis: massage most effective for DOMS and perceived fatigue). Not from this paper
Reasonable use: 30-60 s per muscle group before training. Not from this paper; the base's own practice
Do not expect a "miracle" — a mobility/subjective-comfort tool, not a proven recovery agent
Limitations
Abstract not retrievable at the time of this check — every claim about this paper's results is unverified
Acute effects only (by title); long-term benefit for recovery/performance is not addressed
Heterogeneity of devices/protocols in the percussion literature
How this entry was checked and changed
Why this level
regraded 2026-09-27 from B: the paper's abstract could not be retrieved (OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC, PubMed, Semantic Scholar all empty; publisher page blocked), so design, n and effect sizes are unverified
Content correction 2026-09-27
The abstract could not be retrieved from any source; all result claims marked "source not verified"; "30-60 s" labelled as the base's own practice
Level B -> C+ (unverified source); Sport line "combat" -> "general"; cross-reference REF-557 redirected to REF-385 (REF-557 is a declared duplicate); Journal line adds Vol. 22(3) from the DOI record
Cross-references to duplicate stubs repointed to their canonical entries (REF-557->REF-385); the stubs were emptied on 2026-09-27.