Kinesio Taping: The science in detail

The Dubious Science of Kinesiology Tape
Therapeutic taping (Kinesio Tape® and several newer competitors) grew out of traditional compression bandaging, got commercialized as a chiropractor’s invention in the 70s, and then exploded in popularity with the innovation of colour at the 2012 Olympics. The hype machine churned out spin-off products, and many dubious claims about therapeutic benefits like injury prevention and performance enhancement. All the attention inspired a lot of research, and so we now know for sure what seemed obvious to many all along: it’s all much ado about nothing. Taping certainly doesn’t increase circulation, enhance performance, promote injury recovery, reduce inflammation, or provide meaningful support. At best it’s just a bit of minor sensory tinkering with trivial, inconsistent pain relief benefits. That’s fine as far as it goes, but consider not feeding your money to a hype machine — it’s not worth it.
Modern therapeutic taping is dominated by stretchy, breathable, adhesive fabric strips in a wide variety of colours, shapes, weights, and textures. They are used mainly by athletes with the hope of boosting performance, preventing and recovering from injury, and easing pain.
Taping variants have a long history in athletics and physical therapy, ranging from the medically pragmatic — supporting a sprained ankle — to barely more than a fashion statement. This article is mainly about the fad/phenomenon of elastic therapy taping, which got going in the 1970s and then exploded in popularity at the 2012 Olympics, where many athletes were covered in SpiderTech tape; other brands rode the wave, like the much older but revitalized Kinesio® Tape, and new competitors like RockTape® and KT Tape®. Without that Olympic boost, taping would probably still be quite obscure.
The therapeutic value of taping has always been dubious at best, and so it remains. Tape probably alters sensation enough to “tinker” with pain and stiffness, a kind of boosted placebo. There’s nothing much new going on here except the marketing, especially the stroke of genius of making tape colourful (an idea that was worth millions). Even elite athletes and their coaches can easily be victims of fads and fashion, and if anything they are actually notoriously superstitious, and their endorsements are not credible.1
The amount of tape being used by athletes lately is fun but fanciful. Science thoroughly undermines it.
Kinesio Taping was invented by chiropractor Kenzo Kase in the 1970s, and today the company owns several variations of the trademark. “If it doesn’t say Kinesio®, its [sic] not the real thing,” says the Kinesio Tape company, and you call it lowercase “kinesio” tape at your own legal risk.2 Several competitors are now staking a claim on the same ground, each with their own branding spin, but it all started with Kinesio Tape.
“Kinesio” is an abbreviation of kinesiology, the scientific study of movement (also a profession in some places). The brand gets credibility from the word “kinesiology,” but it’s not kinesiology: it’s branding, a product that hitched its wagon to kinesiology with a name.3 It could just as easily have been “Thera Tape” or “Physio Tape” or “Rehab Tape.”
Is taping a brand or a generic concept? A bit of both
Kinesio Taping and its competitors are all classic modality empires, commercialized methods and products that are more about marketing than medicine.4 “Kinesio Taping” is a trademark, but one that is being drowned out by new takes on the same idea: “trademark genericide.” Trademarks die when they become so popular and familiar that people forget who invented them (or never learn in the first place), and when they blur together with competing products and brands, all just variations on a theme. Today people often talk about the brands, but also use terms that no company has (yet) trademarked, like kinesiology taping, therapy taping, athletic taping — all riffing on Kenzo Kase’s big idea: “taping the world for health to release the body’s natural healing power.”
More tape, more! This photo illustrates as well as anything the fashionable, faddish character of therapeutic taping. Stock photography in this category is completely dominated by pretty women festooned with colour-coordinated tape, an exaggeration of the reality: taping is used almost exclusively by fit young athletes, clearly treating it partly like a fashion accessory.
The evolution of old school taping for support and compression
When you wrap a sprained ankle in a compression bandage, that’s “taping” too. For instance, ACE™ Tape is a popular 3M brand that has been around forever and makes only the modest promise to “provide protection for weak and injured joints.” For whatever it’s worth, taping has been used to squeeze and stabilize tissue since forever, probably the Stone Age — and it’s not entirely clear why, because it doesn’t really seem to actually do much.56 But in the 20th Century, with the rise of various forms of physical therapy, fancier methods started to emerge long before Kenzo Kase branded a specific product/method.
People were already trying fancier biomechanical tricks with tapes, trying to “correct” things — like making kneecaps slide more evenly.7 It’s difficult to fix dysfunctional biomechanics with tape (surprise surprise).
This trend required faith that (1) such dysfunctions exist in the first place, (2) that they actually matter, and(3) that they can be treated at all, let alone with “hacks” (like a bit of stretchy tape). That’s a fragile chain of premises that has been rusting for twenty years. The “simple” problems of musculoskeletal medicine have proved much too messy for mechanical metaphors to be useful.8
“Structuralism” is the excessive focus on simplistic physical factors in pain, injury & performance — the kinds of things that tape is supposed to “correct.” Reality is far messier.
What does Kinesio Tape supposedly do? Claims, claims, claims!
Therapy tape tries to have its biomechanical cake and reach beyond it too: supposedly it also has effects of physiology too. Here’s an assortment of claims from only the major manufacturers over time:
release the body’s natural healing power
promote the body’s natural healing processes
can be used for hundreds of common injuries
provides 24 hour pain relief per application for days at a time
recovery, performance, prevention
reduce inflammation and swelling
stimulate the epidermis at a cellar [sic] level
lift and elevate the space between the tissue layers in the epidermis
reduce itching and pain from scars
support and alleviate skin tension
support and stabilize the muscles in your lower back
muscle and joint support system to protect against inflammation and chronic pain
lifts the skin, decompressing the layers of fascia, allowing for greater movement of lymphatic fluid which transports white blood cells throughout the body and removes waste products, cellular debris, and bacteria.
helping the muscle to not over-extend or over-contract
Oh, and let’s not forget: “treats elephantine arthritis!” See below.
Is there anything this stuff can’t do? What’s next? It’ll clean your gutters? Walk your dog? Most of these are gibberish, a vomit of buzzwords, vague promises, and not-even-wrong marketing non-sequiturs. If you boil it all down to specific, testable, plausible claims, this is roughly what we’re left with:
reduces pain
prevents injury and promotes recovery
enhances performance (mainly by increasing circulation)
Can taping do any of that? I am skeptical — and I am not alone.
An asinine aside
This is an fine example of how absurd the taping fad has become. The Houston Zoo proudly tweeted a photo of a taped up elephant on Mar 1, 2021. Their explanation:
“You might see our elderly Asian elephant, Methai sporting a new look in the yard! She’s been fitted with KT tape by Dr. Marziani, one of our consulting veterinarians who specializes in physical therapy, chiropractic, and other non-invasive therapeutics in animals. KT tape is an elastic sports tape designed to relieve pain while supporting muscles, tendons, & ligaments. At 51, she is starting to show signs of arthritis & stiffness. Our animal care professionals work hard to ensure every animal at the Zoo receives the best care possible!”
Bonkers. But at least it was nice to see so many exasperated, critical reactions to it. Dr. Clay Jones for ScienceBasedMedicine.org:
If KT has no specific benefit in humans, and at most some minor and brief placebo-driven alteration in the perception of pain or impetus to try a little harder during a workout, what could it possibly do for an elephant? Elephant skin is tougher and much thicker than human skin, 25 to 40 millimeters compared to our paltry 2 millimeters. Their muscles are also considerably stronger and their superficial vasculature held even more firmly in place. The claim that a strip of stretchy tape is doing anything at all to elephant physiology approaches homeopathy levels of implausibility.
Class action lawsuits about therapeutic taping
Class action lawsuits don’t prove anything, but their prevalance here is a strong clue that these companies are reaching far enough beyond the science to frustrate a lot of people. KT Health claimed that KT Tape “can be used for hundreds of common injuries” and “provides 24 hour pain relief per application for days at a time through sweat, strain and humidity” … which led to a class action lawsuit.9
Other companies appear to have taken note. The tagline of the Spider Tech website used to say: “Recovery, Performance, Prevention,” but not now! The RockTape about page put out big claims, though carefully framed as a personal view,10 but now removed entirely, probably out of legal caution — but RockTape is now also being sued. They now have a (very fine-print) “not clinically proven for all injuries” asterisk on many of their pages — as if it’s “proven” for any!
“Proof” of benefit is a very high bar that has definitely not been cleared by tape in any way.
Taping in the court of science
Sports medicine is still surprisingly primitive and far from evidence-based in general.11 Many commercial products never get tested properly, if at all. Lucky for us, taping is an exception: taping has gotten lots of research attention, thanks to having the stuff splashed all over our screens constantly during the 2012 Olympics. Other chiropractic inventions (scraping massage tools or applied kinesiology, for instance) might be represented by only a handful of studies on PubMed. There are more than 1200 for Kinesio Tape (as of 2023).
Don’t worry, I won’t cite them all.
Graph of PubMed search results over time for “KinesioTape.”
Therapy taping for pain and injury recovery: a “sensational” product
A cat knows when it has tape stuck to its paw, and so does a human! We can feel tape, and novel sensory input has the potential to change the output — motor control and pain.12 Stick some tape on a bad knee, make sure the patient expects it to be therapeutic, and chances are good that the patient will feel a bit better… for a while. It’s even possible that the knee will actually in some sense work a bit better, for a while.
Several scientific reviews over the last decade all reported evidence of minor benefits for injured athletes.13141516 Case closed? How can a taping skeptic spin that? Like this…
If you read those papers, you’ll get the idea that “something” must be going on… but it’s also clearly not much of something. These are classic damned-with-faint-praise results that we constantly see in sports and musculoskeletal medicine. And whatever modest benefit the studies claim to have discovered is probably coming from bias-powered design flaws, statistical jiggery pokery, and placebo that hasn’t been completely controlled.
And it only gets worse from there. Other studies are even more underwhelming or just clearly negative.17181920
In the weird world of pain, bogus treatments can pass seemingly fair tests just because they drive a more potent placebo effect by using persuasive sensations, like tape on your skin.21 A more potent placebo is still just a placebo, and it doesn’t mean the treatment works. All it means is that some things can shovel more false hope than others.22
Taping for performance enhancement
If you exclude the worst studies, these are the kind of results you see for taping’s effect on strength (and strength is an excellent proxy for performance in general):
Taping did not increase quads strength in healthy volunteers in a 2012 test.23
A similar test in 2016 measured both strength and function (with the “single hop test for distance”). Taping didn’t help.24
A 2015 study used healthy elite female athletes as subjects. It was a small but well-designed test, and entirely negative; the authors “do not recommend the use of KT for the purpose of improving jump performance.”25
Another jumping trial in 2018 tested jumping both with and without fatigue, finding “no effect on performance or elastic behavior” and declared it “not effective for demanding activities.”26
Eighteen strong young lads had their legs taped up while seated and then given tests of flexibility and strength of knee extension. These tests were repeated with knee sleeves, sham taping, and nothing at all. Taping had no effect whatsoever.27
Rocktape had no benefit compared to sham taping for people with knee osteoarthritis.28
A 2018 review of these studies and many others concluded that “there is a lack of compelling evidence to support the use of KT to enhance the sports performance abilities.”29
Being generous, it’s possible that performance could be subtly enhanced through a combination of minor benefits, individually hard to detect but collectively significant.30 Such enhancement would be modest at best, but could be real if any other benefits are real. However, by far the most common specific mechanism cited is “increasing circulation,” and that is just nonsense…
Taping to boost performance with circulation
Increasing circulation has always been touted as a mechanism by every other snake oil salesman. But we’re talking about tape on your skin, for crying out loud: this doesn’t stand up to a little physiological perspective, let alone rigorous testing. Circulation is mainly driven by metabolic demand — not by minor stimulation of the skin and superficial connective tissues, or even a bunch of mechanical squishing (as in massage therapy, see Does Massage Increase Circulation?).
The idea that tape can increase circulation anywhere near enough to fight fatigue while exercising is extremely wishful thinking. Blood doping, cocaine, and better fitness can fight fatigue. Not tape.
In someone with venous insufficiency — basically, blood pooling in the legs — you can bind up their calves with tape like compression socks, and that will be … about as helpful as compression socks, and a lot fussier. And you can do that, because obviously you can imitate compression socks with tape, and this has been confirmed.31 I would only be surprised by a robust effect on fit people, and downright shocked if it was a robust enough effect to affect performance, let alone elite performance. We’ve got to get beyond the circulatory effects of “compression” to make a claim of “circulation boosting” stick.
In 2012, Stedge et al did a particularly on-the-nose test of circulation in sixty healthy and active people. This was a well-designed and highly relevant study: they checked muscular endurance, blood flow, and more in the gastrocnemius, the big calf muscle, both with and without taping. But nothing was even slightly different in the taped calves.32 Fail!
Not that mere increased skin circulation would be significant to athletes, but kinesiology taping doesn’t even do that, for what it’s worth: a 2020 test found no effect at all compared to non-elastic taping or placebo.33
I wouldn’t bet on taping being standard equipment for the pro sports teams and Olympians of the future.
Wart removal incident (pure whimsy here)
This has nothing to do directly with kinesiology tape. It’s just pure silliness about tape: a study of removing warts with duct tape. It was not very good, but it did give us this quote, which is comedy gold:
“One patient enrolled in the duct tape arm lost his study wart in a trampoline toe-amputation accident and was also not included in our analysis.”
Bemused scientific post script: does the colour of the tape matter?
Surely black tape is the fastest? Well, maybe red… 🤔
But no. A 2018 study reported completely negative results from testing the effect of kinesiology tape colour on performance and function — which might just be the least surprising study result in the history of sports medicine.34 Dr. Clay Jones for ScienceBasedMedicine.org:
Nothing mattered. Tape color didn’t matter. Color preference didn’t matter. “Proper” placement of KT with tension didn’t matter. No effect on performance, strength, or function was found in any experimental round compared to the control round for any of the subjects. It was a solidly negative result that is in line with previous and much better studies, showing that KT doesn’t have any specific benefit or much of a non-specific benefit either. And the effect of colored versus plain KT doesn’t deserve any ad hoc excuses.
That all said, it wouldn’t actually have shocked me if colour made a difference. I simply would have chalked it up to the psychological power of snazzy dressing and feeling cool.
Taping conclusions
Is there something to it? Something less than amazing, but better than nothing? Sure, if you define something as:
fairly cheap
totally safe
a strong placebo effect
Tape is just a sensation-tweaker. Playfully creating fresh sensations a very homo sapiens thing to do. If we don’t do it with tape, we’ll do it with something else. We are input-ouput machines, constantly and creatively screwing around with how we feel, touch-testing the world. That’s fine as far as it goes. Applying tape in this spirit is only “wishful thinking” if you have unreasonable expectations of it.
But unreasonable expectations are exactly what most people have.
Taping gets a lot of testimonials, of course. One taping enthusiast told me, emphasis mine, “I know there’s too much hype, but taping has amazing results.” Really? “Amazing” isn’t just a wee bit hyperbolic? Antiobiotics are amazing. Heart transplants are amazing. The results of taping are not amazing.
Functional challenge (training) is always going to be far more important drivers of recovery and performance than any amount of sensory tinkering. Tape is a gimmick promising a short-cut. I don’t think it has a hope in hell of generating consistent, clinically significant effects on function in rehab, let alone in healthy athletes. The bottom line is always going to be that we have to stress ourselves a bit to get better than we are — and being taped isn’t much of a challenge.
About Paul Ingraham
I am a science writer in Vancouver, Canada. I was a Registered Massage Therapist for a decade and the assistant editor of ScienceBasedMedicine.org for several years. I’ve had many injuries as a runner and ultimate player, and I’ve been a chronic pain patient myself since 2015. Full bio. See you on Facebook or Twitter., or subscribe:
What’s new in this article?
Five updates have been logged for this article since publication (2013). All PainScience.com updates are logged to show a long term commitment to quality, accuracy, and currency. more
Like good footnotes, update logging sets PainScience.com apart from most other health websites and blogs. It’s fine print, but important fine print, in the same spirit of transparency as the editing history available for Wikipedia pages.
I log any change to articles that might be of interest to a keen reader. Complete update logging started in 2016. Prior to that, I only logged major updates for the most popular and controversial articles.
2021 — Minor science update, just piling on with another new negative trial of taping (McManus).
2021 — Major upgrade, a complete reboot of the article: more of everything, especially citations. Previously it was just a brief “position statement” on the topic, now it’s a full-fledged critical analysis. The bottom line is still the same: skeptical. The biggest single change is the strong emphasis on the interesting fact that therapeutic taping was a chiropractor’s invention from back in the 1970s, and a relatively obscure one until the 2012 Olympics, not a staple of physical therapy and rehab. This really helps make the important point that therapeutic taping is more about marketing than medicine.
2020 — Added short new section about some silly research: “Bemused scientific post script: does the colour of the tape matter?” Spoiler: no.
2019 — Added three citations showing a lack of effect of taping on pain.
2017 — Added footnote about a class action lawsuit of taping claims.
2013 — Publication.
Notes
On the one hand, elite athletes and their coaches and trainers are constantly driving innovation in exercise and sports health science, with obviously impressive results over time — a strongly positive long term trend. Today’s athletes are capable of feats that were once unthinkable. On the other hand, they are also wrong a lot, and countless approaches have been tried and abandoned over the decades. Often athletes have only made progress when they abandoned the pointless rituals and errors of the past!
They aren’t the first to do that, and probably won’t be the last (see “applied kinesiology,” an ludicrous diagnostic method used by many naturopaths and chiropractors that’s more like palm reading than medicine).
“Modality empire” is my own term for an ego-driven proprietary method or mode of manual therapy — a sub-discipline — championed and promoted by a single charismatic entrepreneur. Most of the “emperors” have healer syndrome, lack humility, make big promises, and make their money from unusually expensive therapy, workshops and books. Professionals are sold on the opportunity to purchase credibility in the form of increasing “levels” of certification, but the quality of these certifications is completely unregulated and often dubious. A modality empire is as much a business model as a method of helping people, and many are quite unoriginal, just branding old ideas for a new generation of workshop consumers. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between modality empires and quackery, but (just as obviously) they aren’t all bad. For more information, see Modality Empires: The trouble with the toxic tradition of ego-driven, trademarked treatment methods in massage therapy, chiropractic, and physiotherapy.
No one doubts that you can stabilize a joint with tape, although there are many reasonable doubts about how much it matters. The answer is probably just that it feels nice: sensory distraction and reassurance. It probably provides minor pain relief, top-down modulation due to the joint feeling more secure and safe. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not going to register as a significant therapeutic effect.
I discuss this specific use in much greater detail in my patellofemoral pain syndrome book. Long story short, the evidence shows that taping has little or no effect on patellar position. For instance, as early as 1993, Bockrath et al found taping was “not associated with patella position changes,” and in 2002 Salsich et al showed that “vastus lateralis EMG activity level did not change with taping.”
“Structuralism” is the excessive focus on crookedness and “mechanical” problems as causes of pain. It has been the dominant way of thinking about how pain works for decades, and yet it is a source of much bogus diagnosis. Structuralism has been criticized by several experts, and many studies confirmed there are no clear connections between biomechanical problems and pain. Many fit, symmetrical people have severe pain problems! And many crooked people have little pain. Certainly there are some structural factors in pain, but they are generally much less important than messy physiology, neurology, psychology. Structuralism remains dominant because it offers comforting, marketable simplicity. For instance, “alignment” is the dubious goal of many major therapy methods, especially chiropractic adjustment and Rolfing. See Your Back Is Not Out of Alignment: Debunking the obsession with alignment, posture, and other biomechanical bogeymen as major causes of pain.
I discovered that the tape can be used to ENHANCE PERFORMANCE. I found that taping in advance of exercise promotes increased blood flow to the muscles, thereby reducing fatigue.
An archived 2015 copy of the original is still available. The page was revised to be a bit more cautious in 2016 and 2017, and then it disappeared altogether from their American website in 2018.
We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t fix most chronic pain. The science and treatment of pain was neglected for decades while medicine had bigger fish to fry, and it remains a backwater to this day. The seemingly simpler “mechanical” problems of musculoskeletal health care have proven to be surprisingly weird and messy. The field is dominated by obsolete conventional wisdom and the speculations of desperate patients and opportunistic cure purveyors. Ignorance is widespread thanks to professional pride and tribalism, ideological momentum, screwed up incentives, and poor critical thinking skills. But the worst single offender? The pernicious oversimplification of treating the body too much like it’s a complex mechanical device that breaks down: (“structuralism”). See A Historical Perspective On Aches ‘n’ Pains: We are living in a golden age of pain science and musculoskeletal medicine … sorta.
After showing that patellar taping improved proprioception (see Callaghan 2002), this straightforward study of brain activity is small and un-powerful, but it also isn’t trying to prove much: just that “patellar taping modulates brain activity in several areas of the brain during a proprioception knee movement task.” This tends to support the notion that taping changes how the knee feels, at least temporarily, which may in turn have an effect on pain.
Kinesio taping does not appear to have a beneficial effect on pain when compared with sham treatment. Based mostly on studies of healthy populations, there are inconsistent results for other outcome measures such as ROM, strength, muscle activity and proprioception. … At present there appears to be little high quality evidence on which to assess the effectiveness of kinesio taping, it is hoped that future research will clarify the situation.
This paper reports on a test of several physical therapy techniques — taping, exercises, massage and mobilization — for knee osteoarthritis. I wouldn’t really expect any of those to be helpful for osteoarthritis, and they weren’t in this test. The researchers compared the treatment programme to a non-treatment of “sham ultrasound and light application of a non-therapeutic gel.” Everything produced pretty about the same results; the treatment programme was “no more effective than regular contact with a therapist.” This makes every component of the treatment programme look bad. If even one of them was moderately effective, patients should have gotten better. So this study constitutes decent evidence that taping, exercise, and massage are basically useless treatments for osteoarthritis of the knee, both individually and together, are not really going to put a dent in osteoarthritis.
Shocker: this experiment found that applying athletic taping had no effect on muscle strength: “These results do not support the use of kinesiotape applied in this way to change maximal muscle strength in healthy people.”
Advocates of taping have protested that a study of healthy subjects is irrelevant, but it’s clear that tape is routinely, fashionably used on/by many serious and elite athletes who are fighting fit and not “injured” enough for it to be likely to make a meaningful difference to this research. In other words, if tape can’t enhance the strength of an average healthy athlete, it probably can’t do it for a slightly injured elite one either.
“Performance enhancement” is usually a problematic claim, because it’s commonly based on sloppy extrapolation from recovery effects (which are themselves often a bit sketchy). What helps people who are sick or broke is definitely not necessarily effective for fit, healthy people. Rehabilitation and performance enhancement are different things. On the one hand, they are the same process with different starting points. On the other hand, how much value the body can extract from an input is generally proportionate to the need. A glass of water is more important to a man dying of thirst, and novel sensation is more neurologically useful to an injured person than a healthy Olympian. Many things that are legitimately useful in rehab are pretty much useless for performance enhancement. Here’s a simple, tangentially related example: compression bandaging for swelling. Unambiguously handy in recovery … but useless if you’re not swollen!