When you're working hard toward athletic performance goals, it's natural for your muscles to experience soreness. This pain might affect your training or even cause you to take unplanned days off. While it's important to rest your muscles, you can also find relief by using a massage gun to loosen up and get the blood flowing to your problem areas.
A massage gun works by pounding your muscles at a rate of up to 4,000 times per minute. The depth of the stroke (called a percussion) and the amount of force determines how powerful the massage gun feels. More muscular people who like a hard massage should look for a massage gun with a higher stroke rate, more percussions per minute, and more force. If you're more sensitive, then a lighter-duty massager should get the job done.
Some massage guns use vibrations rather than percussions to loosen you up. In our research, we didn't find any vibrating massage guns that approached the quality and effectiveness of percussive guns, so we didn't include any in our guide.
Massage guns are a must if you're an athlete, and they may be helpful to have around if you like to push yourself to achieve new fitness goals. For instance, they can help warm up your muscles before an early morning race or keep them from tightening up after you're done.
How we test massage gunsWhen we get a massage gun to test, there are a few features and performance metrics we look for.
Here are the main attributes we look for:
Loudness: When you're using your massager, odds are you'll want to watch or listening to something at the same time. If your gun is too loud, it makes enjoying media difficult and may annoy others. I hold a sound meter 12 inches away from the massage gun while it's at its highest speed to gauge loudness. If quietness is important to you, look for one that's under 60 decibels.
Percussions: This includes percussions or strokes per minute, how deep the strokes are, and if the speeds are adjustable. You may find different speeds feel better on different body parts. And, stroke depth generally correlates with how "hard" the massage feels.
Ease of Use: Several characteristics make a massager easy to use, including weight, number of handles, how comfortable the handles feel, whether the massage arm the heads attach to is adjustable, and if the controls are intuitive.
Battery: You don't want a gun's battery dying in the middle of a session. You also want your device ready to go when you need it, even when you forget to charge it. A long battery runtime ensures you can work out those kinks several times before the gun must charge. Swappable batteries are also helpful so you can have a backup if one dies.
Accessories: Round hard foam heads come standard with most massage guns. The better options also come with other head attachments for working different body parts. For instance, if you plan on working small muscle groups, a cone or pointy head is useful. A carrying case for your gun and accessories is also a must if you travel a lot.
Along with testing several massage guns, we looked at expert and buyer ratings and reviews of all the top brands. Our guide features massagers that help you warm up for and recover from your workouts, have useful features that justify their price, and that ultimately performed well in our own personal tests.
Here are the best massage guns you can buy:Updated on 6/5/2020 by Rick Stella: Added the Theragun Mini as our best portable massage gun pick, removed the Theragun G3 as it's no longer available, checked the availability of each pick, and updated the prices, links, and formatting throughout.