Throughout high school I was a track distance runner that ran up to forty miles a week. This could be extremely taxing on someone’s body. I constantly got injured throughout my years of running. I often got the same injury of feeling pain in my knees. I eventually visited a doctor and he told me I had something called it band syndrome. It band syndrome is when the tissue that surrounds your knee becomes inflamed and starts rubbing against the bone.

I was extremely disappointed that my season had to end but off to physical therapy I went. In physically therapy I did many different exercises. After every session my physically therapist would put this tape on my knee. She was using kinesiology tape. She said the purpose of the tape was to produce circulation in my leg and reduce the inflammation. I wondered to myself how could a piece of tape do all of that? It seemed like some kind of psychological process where if i thought the tape was helping it would stop the pain. I personally did not feel like it helped that much and the tape would constantly fall off.                                                       ( image from allindiaroundup.com)

While watching the Olympics this summer I also saw that many of the athletes were wearing this brightly colored tape in many different arrangements on their body. If world class athletes were using this, it would seem as if there would be some truth behind the working of KT tape. In an interesting experiment it shows that the positive effects might be due to a placebo effect. The experiment was performed with thirty people. The experiment consisted of people having the real kinesiology tape or KT tape, a fake tape or no tape at all. The participants were blindfolded and were told to preform different exercises. All the participants performed the same and proved that KT tape does not help in performance. The benefits that many people think they are attaining may be due to placebo effect. The Global Rating of Change Scale shows that there is a low to moderate correlation between the taped used and performance level.

KT tape might just be a hyped up thing that has a psychological effect. Philip Newton, a physiotherapist states that the bright colors of the tape might induce athletes to wear it. Bandage before used to be a dull color that can be seen as a sign of weakness. Many athletes would want to hide this. But now athletes wear the tape as a badge of honor and wear it with confidence. Tim Locke points out in an article that putting on the tape might be a part of an athlete’s ritual before a big game. It almost becomes a part of their uniform to put on the tape. There is really no scientific evidence behind the working of the tape and therefore might all be psychological. Experts also have a tough time wrapping their head around the idea of a piece of tape being able to reap so many benefits.

( image from www.fiterature.com)