Add percussive therapy to your post-workout routine with our expert-picked massage guns, from mini and deep-tissue massage guns to budget options. The best running shoes to take you from trail to road to marathon. M assage guns are often pitched at the highly active. They can help you warm up for workouts, accelerate recovery and generally keep things loose and injury-free.
These personal-care power tools use rapid, repetitive pressure and vibrations to penetrate tired muscles, with a selection of heads, variable speeds and even automated routines to tailor treatments towards tight trouble spots. But not all muscle massage guns are made equal. To find out which gun massagers deliver the best bang for your buck, I spent the month of December yes, over Christmas giving myself DIY myofascial manipulation four times a day. The holidays are an interesting time β maybe even the best time β to undertake a massive test of massage guns.
I train most days, sometimes twice, regularly racking up more than 50 miles a week and occasionally running solo marathons. And I do it all in the name of testing running shoes and watches. I put nine of the latest massage guns through an intensive two-day test. That included a brief full-body, wake-up going over in the early morning, a pre-run or pre-training activation, and a short post-workout recovery session.
I ended each day with a short wind-down rubdown, about an hour before bed. I am now officially the most massaged human on the planet.
I tried all the different head attachments, speed settings, heat and cold options, and I worked on my weak spots. As a daily runner, I suffer from all sorts of tightness: tight calves, quads, glutes and adductors β not to mention fatigued feet. I had plenty to work on. Anyone who came to my house over the holidays also got massaged. I downloaded any available apps and followed the guided plans, checked whether the battery life largely lived up to the listed times, and used a decibel sound app to compare the loudness of each gun.
