ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Here's what that looks like in practice. There were 49 studies that measured lactate levels with and without compression; 40 of them found no effect. Another 39 looked at creatine kinase, a blood marker of muscle damage; 27 of them found no effect. For heart rate, 53 of 68 studies found no effect. In all these cases, the other studies found generally small positive effects. The picture is roughly the same for performance measures like jump height or time trial, and for measures of inflammation and swelling.

Things get a little more interesting when you look at subjective measures. For perceived muscle soreness in the days following a hard workout, 29 of 50 studies reported positive effects. For perceived muscle pain, six of nine studies were positive.

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