Exercise performance / muscle recovery
Phototherapy for exercise performance and recovery markers systematic review
Leal-Junior ECP, et al. Lasers in Medical Science. 2015.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of red/NIR phototherapy for exercise performance and recovery markers found favorable but heterogeneous effects.
Evidence grade
low
Effect direction
positive
Panel relevance
partially-replicable
Key findings
- The review included 16 randomized controlled trials, 13 of acceptable quality.
- Performance outcomes such as time to exhaustion and repetitions favored phototherapy in some analyses.
- The best signal was for targeted red/NIR laser or LED dosing around exercise, not ambient whole-body exposure.
Protocol details
| Wavelengths | Not reported nm |
|---|---|
| Irradiance | Not reported mW/cm2 |
| Fluence | Not reported J/cm2 |
| Session time | Not reported minutes |
| Frequency | Varied across exercise studies |
| Duration | Varied across exercise studies |
| Treatment area | Target muscles |
| Device type | Red/NIR low-level laser or LED phototherapy devices |
Caveats
- Point dosing in clinical exercise studies does not convert cleanly to broad-panel exposure.
- The review predates newer negative or mixed running and whole-body PBM evidence.