Do compression garments actually speed up recovery?
They reliably make you feel less sore and more recovered. Whether they actually restore strength and power any faster is disputed — and since a snug garment can't be blinded, a good chunk of that felt benefit is probably perception.
The research on compression gear splits cleanly along one line, and once you see it the whole debate makes sense: how you feel versus what your muscles can actually do.
On the feel side, the studies mostly agree. Hill’s 2014 meta-analysis of 12 trials found a modest reduction in soreness, and Dupuy’s 2018 head-to-head comparison of recovery methods found garments cut DOMS and perceived fatigue by a small-to-moderate amount. Tellingly, that same Dupuy review showed garments barely moved objective damage markers like creatine kinase — they changed how sore people felt far more than what was happening inside the muscle.
On the function side, the meta-analyses openly disagree. Hill 2014 reported moderate benefits for restoring strength and power. But the most rigorous recent look — Négyesi 2022, restricted to randomized trials and co-authored by Hill herself — found essentially zero strength-sparing effect at every time point, and flatly advised coaches to reconsider using them. A 2025 review landed in between: a small but real effect, with the caveat that 27 of its 28 studies sat at moderate risk of bias.
Why the placebo question won’t go away
That bias has a specific cause: you always know when you’re wearing tight compression gear, so expectation rides along with every measurement. And notice the pattern — the outcomes that hold up best are the subjective ones (soreness, how recovered you feel), which are exactly the ones expectation inflates. The harder-to-fake outcomes — force output, blood markers — are where the effect thins out. That’s precisely what you’d see if a good chunk of the benefit lives in your head rather than your legs.
So should you bother?
Yes, if you like them. Feeling less beat-up is a real benefit, it may get you back to training more willingly, and the downside is essentially nil. Just don’t treat them as a device that physically repairs muscle faster than rest and food already do. Wear them for comfort between sessions — not as a shortcut around actual recovery.