It’s Not Whether Kinesio Tape Works, It’s The Stories About Why

by Andrew SchaefferJul 21, 2019Uncategorized0 comments

Kinesio tape can look pretty cool. The designs it makes across your body are vaguely reminiscent of war paint, conveying a hint of toughness to onlookers. It’s like you’re saying “nothing can stop me, not even pain!” Of course, while the aesthetic is fun, the actual purpose of kinesio tape is its purported benefits to injury treatment and performance enhancement. Whether or not it works is something of an open question, but the truly interesting story isn’t so much if it does or doesn’t, it’s the stories we use to explain how it supposedly might.

Kinesio Tape – Attractive But Unproven

Taping, in a variety of forms, has been around for decades. Kinesio tape in particular exploded into the mainstream during the 2008 Summer Olympics. That’s when, according to an article in Pacific Standard, 50,000 rolls of it were donated to fifty-eight countries.¹ I recall seeing it that year myself and it definitely caught my attention, mostly because it looked cool. Of course, the athletes themselves used it to help them physically, not to make a fashion statement. The main uses of kinesio tape are to reduce pain, speed injury recovery, and enhance performance. But, the next logical question is, of course, does it work?

There are some studies out there, particular in the areas of pain reduction and performance, which have shown that it sometimes does.² ³ There is also plenty of anecdotal reporting, most notably from high level athletes such as the olympians already mentioned, that there’s a benefit. However, the results in these studies are usually small and inconsistent and anecdotal reports, even from athletes, really aren’t reliable evidence. Moreover, there’s a growing suspicion that if the taping is having an effect, a very likely explanation is placebo. In one particularly interesting experiment researchers used a specifically prescribed method of kinesio taping and a placebo method of taping and then tested athletes’ vertical jump. Wouldn’t you know it, both groups showed an improvement, suggesting that simply being taped was enough to increase performance.⁴ In truth, as of right now there probably just isn’t enough quality evidence to be confident about anything. The general consensus is more along the lines of, it’s worth looking into further, but no more than that.⁵ ⁶

The Stories We Tell

The story of kinesio tape could end there—go ahead and use it if you feel like it helps, in the meantime we’ll keep investigating—but there’s actually something more fundamental that we can learn from this particular example. Kinesio tape is a simple, inexpensive, non-invasive therapy. All you have to do is slap it on and get back out there. In a health and wellness environment that is often filled with expensive and sometimes never ending over-treatment, something that can get a person feeling better quickly and with minimal intervention is not necessarily a bad thing. Even if it’s the placebo effect, a result is a result. But what happens when a placebo becomes the basis for the proliferation of a myth? That, perhaps, should give us pause.

For example, a common claim that you can find floating around the internet and in the locker rooms of America is that kinesio tape works by alleviating stress across an injured tissue or joint. The idea is that this highly elastic tape pulls on the skin and that this pulling effect can be used to bring points of a muscle, fascia, or tendon toward each other, or to lift the skin away from the surrounding tissue, or even to create a tiny amount of extra space in joints, all of which, the thought is, helps to reduce friction and therefore resolve inflammation and pain.⁷ ⁸

This idea feels pretty plausible because it jives with our own experience. We live in a world populated with buildings and machines and we know what happens when alignment is off. Things wear out, crack, fall down, bend. Who hasn’t seen a door off its hinge, or a grocery cart with a wheel out of alignment, or ground the gears on a car? It strikes us as perfectly reasonable that the same concepts can be applied to our bodies. Except they can’t. A plethora of research has shown that mechanical dysfunctions and even breakdowns within the human body very often lead to no symptoms. Studies into imaging, such as MRIs, have shown such eyebrow raising results as: that seventy percent of healthy hockey players have abnormal hip and pelvis scans,⁹ that the shoulders of overhead athletes can be shredded and yet lead to no symptoms, even five years after the identification of damage,¹⁰ that age-related rotator cuff tears are so common they should be regarded as normal,¹¹ that disc degeneration, disc bulges, and full on disc herniations can exist in people as early as their twenties, become nearly ubiquitous in people in their eighties, and yet never lead to pain,¹² the list goes on.¹³

This flies in the face of what our rational minds often tell us. If there is damage—if something is torn, bulged, or exploded, mal-aligned, inflamed, or otherwise irritated—it should hurt and if it hurts, it should be corrected, perhaps with some tape that will help restore alignment. It’s all very logical. It just isn’t true.

The Tricky Line Between Placebo And Fairy Tale

The word placebo is sometimes construed as a synonym for fake. That can lead to the conclusion that they are somehow bad, like frauds perpetrated on unsuspecting victims. The truth is placebos can be very useful, particularly in treating subjective experiences like pain, fatigue, or stress.¹⁴ Given everything that has happened in this country with opioids over the last several years, who would argue that a placebo shouldn’t be used if it is an effective alternative to riskier medications?

That being said, while placebos can help with experiential problems like pain or fatigue, which are modulated by the brain, they have not been shown to change physical realities, which is where things can get dicey.¹⁵ Many athletes and exercisers, for example, end up with pain and injuries simply due to over-use. Often, the best solution to this problem is not to be so active, at least for a little while. If the impression is given that taping can ‘fix’ an injury by correcting alignment or speeding recovery and that is used as an excuse to continue with the same level of physical activity, it can be a problem. For professional athletes who need to perform for a championship or an olympic medal, the pay-off for delaying rest and recovery might be worth it. For the average exerciser, it rarely will be.

There’s also the issue of forgoing other effective treatments for the convenience or ease of whatever the placebo might be. As mentioned above, joint and alignment issues in the body often don’t correlate with the presence of pain or injury. What does seem to track though is strength. Being stronger has been shown to reliably reduce the incidence of pain and injury.¹⁶ ¹⁷ Solid strength training, though, is not easy to execute. It’s much easier, less time-consuming, and more appealing for a person to do something like tape a knee and then get back out there for a run than it is to take six weeks off and work on building up their squat or deadlift strength. That’s unfortunate, as it is less likely to be a long term fix to the problem and it also leaves significant performance benefits on the table.

Make Use Of Tools But Avoid Crutches

In the end, kinesio tape is simply a good example of a general rule in health, wellness, and fitness: we should be wary of methodologies and systems, explanations or rationalizations that sound too definitive, because the body can be mysterious. Kinesio tape might very well help someone, but why it does, and whether or not it will help the next person, is still very unclear. That being the case, it would be unwise to put too much stock in its efficacy or to lean on it as a way around engaging in other, less attractive interventions. If it is a crutch—some way to get around a nagging problem without too much discomfort—you may be short-changing yourself.

It’s Not Whether Kinesio Tape Works, It’s The Stories About Why

Kinesio Tape – Attractive But Unproven

The Stories We Tell

The Tricky Line Between Placebo And Fairy Tale

Make Use Of Tools But Avoid Crutches

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