How to use your vibration massage or massage gun safely and effectively

Vibration massage vs conventional massage

It is important to understand the differences between vibration massage and conventional massage. These will be obvious, but get ignored in most advice on massager usage.

Jump straight to the "how to" section

Conventional massage

You will likely be very familiar with this. Conventional massage uses physical pressure for it’s therapeutic effects, so involves pressure and physically rubbing.

The main differences between conventional and vibration

Usage techniques

The usage techniques for conventional massage and vibration massage are completely different. With conventional massage you need to press in to reach the tissue you wish to massage, then possibly move the contact to create friction or a pumping action. With vibration massage is it the vibrations that penetrate and have the therapeutic effects. All you need to do is place the vibration pad over where you wish to massage, then allow the vibrations to penetrate.

Penetration

Conventional massage relies on physical penetration to effect tissues. This may require painful pressure or even be impossible for some deep and hard to get to muscles. On the other hand strong therapeutic vibrations can easily penetrate very deeply without any need for the massager to press in. This is why ultrasound can penetrate right through your body.

Safety and comfort

If you have had a deep tissue conventional massage no doubt you are aware of how painful they can be, and any time one uses such pressure there is always the risk that it causes damage or injury. On the other hand with vibration massage there is no physical pressure or penetration so it is much safer.

Your types of vibrating massagers: vibration and percussion

Genuine therapeutic vibration massagers have been used by professionals for decades, however, more recently marketers have built hybrid devices (percussion massagers or massage guns) that attempt to add the benefits of conventional massage. As you will see, using genuine vibration massagers is easy, but the hybrid nature of massage guns creates issues we need to discuss.

1. To add conventional massage percussion massagers drive their heads into the muscle, and this reduces the amount of therapeutic vibrations.
2. As you have seen the techniques for vibration and conventional massage are completely different, so which should you use?

The trade off between vibration and conventional massage

In this section we will show you the trade off percussion massagers make, then show you what that means for you using them.

What is the best trade off

Some massage guns drive their heads in further than others, and most come with a variety of heads. Each offers a different trade off between conventional massage and therapeutic vibrations, so which should you use?

Proven benefits of vibration vs percussion

As discussed in our article The scientifically proven effects of vibration massage- with clinical applications and shown in the diagram above, vibrations in the therapeutic range have a a huge amount of proven benefits. These are the the scientific benefits usually mentioned by massage gun marketers when promoting the machines. On the other hand we know of no evidence that punching the head in like a jackhammer does anything worthwhile. We know that conventional massage is good, but doing it with a jackhammer is arguably more likely to hurt you.

What the scientists say about the trade off

Probably the best scientific evidence comes from the scientists who have been asked to conduct clinical trials of percussion massagers (massage guns) (1). As this except from a trial report shows they use special damper heads. These spread out the contact for greater vibration transfer, while reducing the amount the head penetrates. Clearly these scientists determined that the therapeutic benefits come from he vibrations, while driving the head into the muscle adds little and could possibly hurt the patients.

How to use these machines

Now we understand the differences between vibration, percussion and conventional massage lets look at what this means for when you use your machine. Standard disclaimer: the is not specific advice, just general information to be discussed with yur own health care professional.

Using a percussion massager

Maximise the vibration benefits

As mentioned, vibration and conventional massage use different techniques, and what works for one can be totally inappropriate for the other. The reality is that you will get very little, if any, conventional massage benefits from a percussion massager so you are best to use vibration massage techniques to maximise the therapeutic vibrations.

Safety and precautions

Genuine vibration massagers have a larger pad that doesn’t penetrate the muscle, so they are fairly safe. You should always be careful, but by being designed to drive their heads into your muscles percussion massagers or massage guns carry a far greater risk.

Places to avoid

Injured and damaged tissues

The most obvious thing to avoid is damaged tissues such as sprains, torn muscles, bruising or inflammation.

Medical conditions

There are a lot of medical conditions that you’d avoid using a massage gun with. There’s too many to list and I’d still miss some, so when in doubt ask your heath care professional.

Bones

You massage muscles and to a lesser extent other soft tissues. There’s no benefit in massaging bone, and it could be very painful.

Front and side of neck

Whatever you do, avoid the front and side of your neck, like this clown is doing. There’s sharp projections off the vertebrae at the side, and a lot of sensitive structures towards the front.

Joints

Another thing you need to avoid is joints There’s generally no benefit in using a massage gun directly on a joint, and you will likely cause injury.

Neurovascular bundles

You also need to avoid what we call neurovascular bundles. This is where you have major nerves and blood vessels travelling together without much protection. Some major ones in your body are

• in your groin
• behind your knees
• in front of your elbow
• the front of your neck as already mentioned

Calf muscles (vascular)

The last major one to avoid is your calf muscles if you have prominent veins of any suspicion of something vascular going on. There’s a condition called deep vein vein thromboses where you have blood clots in your veins. If you dislodge a clot they can block the arteries to your lungs and kill you.

General safety

They are the dangerous places, to be absolutely avoided, but you should also get rid of any head that looks like it would be at home on a jackhammer. Even when used on muscles massage guns can cause serious damage. Colleagues tell me they are now seeing patients with build ups of scar tissue from using massage guns, and there’s even a report in a journal of someone nearly bleeding to death internally from massage gun injuries (2)⁠.

Irresponsible advice from massage gun marketers

Massage gun advocates make the following claims about massage gun usage. These are wrong, but more importantly they encourage users to use their machines in a way that will cause damage or injury.

The wrong advice

1. Massage guns help break up or disperse fat cells
2. Massage guns break up adhesions.

Conclusion

Hopefully by now you’ll have worked the way to make a massage gun effective is to to make it as much like a genuine vibration massager as possible. The percussion idea of driving the heads to add conventional massage is a gimmick that makes them less effective and less safe. If you have a massage gun you will need to modify it like the scientists do for the trials, but the simplest solution to just get a genuine vibration massager in the first place. For how to do this please see our article How to choose a massager . That said, genuine vibration massagers are not that common, and most are designed for professionals like myself to use on patients rather than for self use. Because of that we built our own personal use vibration massagers.

References

1. Martin JD of H and WU of winchester. A critical evaluation of percussion muscle gun therapy as a rehabilitation tool focusing on lower limb mobility. A literature review. 2021.
2. Chen J, Zhang F, Chen H, Pan H. Rhabdomyolysis After the Use of Percussion Massage Gun : A Case Report. 2021;1–5.