Compression Garments Produced Small Performance Effects in 18-Study Review

A multilevel meta-analysis of 18 controlled studies found that compression garments gave team-sport athletes a performance edge small enough to sit on the boundary of significance. The clearest signal from compression garments was not speed or power but soreness.

Compression Garments have spent two decades on the legs of sprinters, footballers and basketball players without the evidence ever settling, and a systematic review published on October 28, 2026 in Applied Sciences explains part of why: the effects that exist are real but very small, and the studies measuring them are small too.

The review was carried out by Xinyi He and Chunlei Li of the School of Strength and Conditioning Training at Beijing Sport University, with Yuduo Dong of the School of Physical Education at China University of Geosciences in Beijing. The authors pooled 18 controlled studies of compression garments worn during exercise and during post-exercise recovery, using multilevel random-effects models that allow several effect sizes to be drawn from the same study.

That modelling choice matters here. A single trial of compression garments usually reports sprint times, jump height, perceived exertion and a blood marker or two, and treating those as independent inflates confidence. The multilevel approach keeps them grouped by study.

Across the whole performance domain, the pooled effect was a Hedges g of 0.11, with a confidence interval of 0.01 to 0.22 drawn from 9 studies and 51 effect sizes. It clears zero, but only just.

Where Compression Garments Showed a Measurable Effect

Three domains came out positive. Muscle soreness and swelling produced the largest pooled estimate, a g of 0.47 with an interval of 0.20 to 0.74. Neuromuscular response and movement efficiency followed at 0.39, with an interval of 0.22 to 0.56. Performance itself was third, at 0.11.

The ordering is worth pausing on. The domains in which compression garments performed best are the ones built on how an athlete feels and how a limb behaves, not on how fast the athlete moved. That is a different claim from the one usually printed on the packaging.

Five Domains Where Nothing Moved

The remaining domains returned intervals straddling zero. Perceived exercise load came in at 0.08, with an interval of -0.19 to 0.34. Physiological and metabolic responses during exercise sat at -0.09 (-0.28 to 0.11). Muscle damage and inflammation was effectively flat at 0.01 (-0.19 to 0.22).

Recovery fared no better. Perceived recovery and fatigue gave 0.27 but with an interval from -0.51 to 1.05, wide enough to be uninformative. Physiological and metabolic recovery came in at 0.13 (-0.20 to 0.45), and post-exercise performance at 0.05 (-0.14 to 0.25).

So the case for compression garments as a recovery tool, which is how most athletes use them, is the weakest part of this review rather than the strongest.

The gap between the soreness result and the recovery results is awkward to reconcile. If compression garments genuinely reduced swelling and perceived soreness, some knock-on effect on physiological recovery markers might be expected, and the review did not find one. Either the soreness effect is largely perceptual, or three studies are simply too few to settle the question in either direction.

The Outcome-Level Picture Is Flatter Still

Domain-level pooling groups related measures together, which raises statistical power. When the authors dropped to individual outcomes in two-level analyses, none reached statistical significance.

Sprint performance during exercise is the example to remember: a g of 0.14 with an interval of -0.18 to 0.46. For an athlete asking whether compression garments will make them faster over 20 metres, that is the number, and it is indistinguishable from nothing.

Why Risk of Bias Changes How This Reads

The heterogeneity statistics are informative in both directions. The performance domain showed negligible within-study heterogeneity (Level 2 I2 = 0.0%) and low between-study heterogeneity (Level 3 I2 = 9.6%), meaning the studies broadly agreed. But physiological and metabolic responses during exercise reached a Level 2 I2 of 83.2%, and rating of perceived exertion sat at 58.5%.

More consequential is what happened when the authors removed the weakest trials. Excluding randomised studies at high risk of bias weakened the statistical support for the main positive findings. The small positive results therefore rest partly on the studies least able to carry them.

Several domains were also built on very few trials. The neuromuscular estimate of 0.39 came from two studies, and the soreness estimate from three. Two or three studies can yield a tight-looking interval while still representing one laboratory, one garment and one testing protocol, which is a far narrower evidence base than a confidence interval on its own conveys.

The Missing Number Behind Every Compression Garments Trial

The pressure problem deserves its own heading, because it may explain the whole literature. Compression garments are a dose-based intervention: millimetres of mercury applied to a particular limb segment. A review in which that dose is inconsistently measured cannot tell anyone which garment to buy or how tight it should be.

This is why the authors conclude that the current evidence does not establish an optimal compression prescription. Two trials can both test compression garments and apply pressures that differ by a factor that would matter clinically, and the meta-analysis has no way to separate them.

Fitness research runs into this repeatedly when the variable is equipment rather than a prescribed training dose. Work on suspension training for jump and sprint in adolescents and on resistance priming and velocity loss both show how much rides on specifying the dose precisely.

What Athletes Can Reasonably Do With This

The honest summary is that compression garments appear to help with how sore and how coordinated a limb feels, may do very little for performance, and have not been shown to accelerate physiological recovery.

That is not a reason to throw them out. Soreness is a real outcome, and a g of 0.47 for soreness and swelling is the largest effect in the review. It is a reason to stop expecting compression garments to substitute for the things that do have stronger evidence, such as sleep, training structure and graded return to load after injury.

A few practical boundaries follow from the data:

• Treat compression garments as a comfort and soreness measure, not a performance aid.
• Do not expect a measurable sprint or jump benefit; the outcome-level estimates do not support one.
• Recognise that the trials were small and mostly in male athletes, so the findings transfer cautiously.
• Keep injury rehabilitation decisions with a qualified clinician rather than a garment.

Equally, nothing in this review suggests harm. No safety signal emerges, the intervention is inexpensive relative to most recovery technology, and an athlete who finds that compression garments make the day after a match more tolerable has a defensible reason to keep wearing them. The error would be budgeting for them as a performance purchase, or allowing them to displace a return-to-play plan.

For recovery questions with better-established evidence, our coverage of myofascial release against hamstring stretching and of hamstring rehabilitation and return to play is a more useful starting point than anything in this review.