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JULY 26, 2024
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
TALE
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With the summer Olympics in Paris kicking off, spectators around the world will no doubt be seeing the usual parade of athletes in numerous sports who are taped up in unusual ways. Women’s beach volleyball, since it features some of the skimpiest attire in sports, may be where taped athletes are most noticeable. What is the stuff? How does it work? Can you and I use it to improve our games and workouts? Some people refer to it as KT, which is short for kinesio tape. It was invented in the 1970s by Kenzo Kase, a chiropractor trained in Chicago who has practiced in the US and Japan. In fact, the first use of KT in the athletic world was among sumo wrestlers. Dr. Kase marketed the tape as an effective way to support muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints, and in the process help prevent injuries. The tape is also purported to reduce pain by microscopically lifting skin away from pain sensors. The same lifting ability has been advertised as a way to help facilitate greater movement of lymphatic fluids that remove cellular debris and bacteria. Kinesio tape made its first big splash at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics when thousands of rolls were donated to Olympians from all over the world. Many have specifically attributed the tape’s mass popularity to beach volleyball players Misty May and Kerri Walsh. Their dual exposure — hundreds of championships and massive amounts of exposed skin — was a perfect vehicle for publicizing kinesio tape. Significantly, however, one science writer observed that he had never seen “a single athlete, pro beach volleyball players included, wear Kinesio Tape outside of the Olympics.” His conclusion was that sponsorship dollars were the sole reason for the popularity of kinesio tape, especially during televised events. Indeed, the scientific evidence supporting the claims made by k-tape makers is somewhere between slim and non-existent. One study found that the “physiological mechanisms by which [the tape] is presumed to work remain hypothetical, and we can only speculate what they might be.” Tape makers counter that science just hasn’t caught up with the reality experienced by athletes the world over — but eventually it will. That remains to be seen, but even if KT is pure placebo (as most studies seem to conclude), that could be more than enough to convince many to use it. Success in sports is at times as much mental as it is physical, and anything that can offer even the slightest edge might be worth using. That’s particularly true in the context of the Olympics. In one recent qualifying track and field event, the difference between winning and not winning was two hundredths of a second. The clinical evidence that kinesio tape does anything at all may be extremely scant, but could it be worth two hundredths of a second in placebo effect alone? It’s possible. +
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