The luminous greens, oranges, and blues immediately draw the eye. Particularly when tracing the contours of athletic shoulders and thighs. Of course, that is the point—to be conspicuous and identifiable wherever it’s used.

And it’s used with increasing regularity. In fact, there isn’t a single sporting event in the past ten years in which K-Tape hasn’t decorated the body parts of at least a handful of runners, jumpers, and throwers. Using tape to stabilize injured joints is a therapy that’s decades old, but the contemporary brands (of which there are several) claim benefits above-and-beyond the traditional product.

Kinesiology tape, also known as Kinesio Tape, KT Tape, or just K-Tape, is made from 100 percent cotton fiber and “specialized elastic cores” that stretch in length but not width, allowing it to move and flex with muscles and joints. Commercial claims for K-Tape are broad and wide-reaching. It’s used to treat injured shoulders, backs, knees, and ankles; to “stabilize the muscles,” “enhance muscle activation,” and provide an awareness of “muscle engagement” or proprioception. Other vendors claim K-Tape can relieve pain, swelling, and inflammation by “lifting the epidermis of the skin to promote blood and lymph flow … effectively making incremental changes to fascia over time.”

But these mechanisms are an attempt to blind with science—to overwhelm the consumer with technical details and jargon to deliberately bemuse or mislead—and have never been observed empirically.

Yet, it isn’t just athletes and coaches who fall for the fallacy. There is a general perception among professionals that K-Tape has beneficial effects. In a survey of over 1,000 athletic trainers and physical therapists, 74 percent believed that K-tape was effective in injury management, 67 percent believed K-Tape was effective in pain management, and most believed K-Tape stimulated skin receptors and improved local circulation.

As always, the pertinent question is: Do the published data tell a similar story, or has K-Tape, like so many other health and exercise-related products, subverted critical thinking filters around the world?

According to Science

There is extensive literature on K-Tape. Despite a sprinkling of positive studies—showing a small benefit on ankle proprioception and stability—the data are overwhelmingly insignificant. A key-word search on PubMed (a popular online search tool for life sciences and biomedical research) returned fifteen review articles and/or meta-analyses, authored by various groups and institutions, that have summarized the effects of K-Tape on injury management, rehabilitation, and exercise performance. I encourage you to study their methods and results independently, but here are the cliff notes, organized by body part.

Shoulder. A systemic review and meta-analysis of twelve studies (totaling 555 participants) found that K-Tape was no better than “sham taping” (i.e., placebo) for treating shoulder pain or disability. The review also showed that K-Tape was only effective at reducing shoulder pain when combined with exercise, indicating no use as a standalone therapy. A more recent review of ten studies, this time focusing on shoulder impingement (a common condition in which a tendon in the shoulder becomes inflamed), made similar findings. The review concluded that K-Tape was no better at resolving pain or improving function when compared to most other interventions, such as physical therapy or anti-inflammatory medication.

Lower-back. Chronic lower-back pain is a common issue causing enormous social and economic burden. A 2016 review of five randomized controlled trials found that K-Tape, as a standalone treatment or in conjunction with another, was no more effective than conventional physical therapy and/or exercise for improving lower-back pain and disability. The review also found insufficient evidence that K-Tape was better than placebo for improving pain and disability, and only limited evidence that it was superior to placebo for improving range of motion.

Knee. Just three relevant studies were included in a review of K-Tape and knee pain that found no advantage of K-Tape over manual therapy, conventional physiotherapy, or placebo. In addition, when K-Tape outperformed such interventions, the effects were small and unlikely to be clinically significant and/or the trials were low quality. A second review focusing exclusively on knee pain in patients with osteoarthritis found that, while taping didn’t evoke strong adverse outcomes, the clinical effect was slight and there was “no strong evidence regarding the use of elastic taping for pain improvement in patients.”

Ankle. A large meta-analysis totaling eighty-four studies (2,684 participants) explored the effectiveness of K-Tape in preventing ankle injury. It found the intervention to be generally ineffective at improving balance, jumping performance, range of motion, proprioception, or muscle activity in either healthy people, older people, or people with chronic ankle instability. The review concluded that “current evidence does not support or encourage the use of Kinesio taping applied to the ankle for improvements in functional performance, regardless the population.”

A string of other systematic reviews and meta-analyses make null findings, citing “a lack of compelling evidence to support the use of K-Tape to enhance sports performance abilities”; “little quality evidence to support the use of K-Tape over other types of elastic taping in the management or prevention of sports injuries”; “no firm evidence-based conclusion of the effectiveness of [K-Tape] on the majority of movement disorders within a wide range of pathologic disabilities” (Kalron and Bar-Sela 2013); and “insufficient evidence to support the use of K-Tape following musculoskeletal injury, although a perceived benefit cannot be discounted”https://doi.org/10.3810/psm.2012.11.1986.

Why So Popular?

If the evidence is overwhelmingly unconvincing (to adopt a generous turn of phrase), we are once again left questioning how an exercise-related product has transcended the boundaries of basic science to become so ubiquitous. And, once again, the answer lies in the way it’s marketed to exploit inherent flaws in human reasoning.

K-Tape was developed in the 1970s by chiropractor Kenzo Kase and gained early visibility through sponsorship deals with well-known athletes. But it wasn’t until 2008 that the brand really came to prominence. In a stroke of marketing brilliance, more than 50,000 rolls of tape were donated to athletes and sports teams in fifty-eight countries, including the United States, immediately prior to the Beijing Olympic Games. The eye-catching colors were subsequently seen on high-profile athletes across numerous televised sports, particularly track and field and beach volleyball. K-Tape vendors successfully exploited an ingrained bias called the Exposure Effect (or Familiarity Effect)—a psychological phenomenon whereby people develop a preference for things with which they are familiar. This helps generate revenue on the basis that brand awareness increases brand equity.

Exploiting flaws in cognition to sell product is nothing new. Unfortunately, the popularity of K-Tape has been facilitated by a “health and wellness space” that allows marketing to take precedence over scientific evidence.

Conclusions

When the omnipresence of K-tape in health and fitness is contrasted against the evidence for its benefit, the disparity is among the largest I have seen for any intervention, second only to chiropractic and homeopathy. Exactly how long this practice will endure, despite the damning evidence, remains to be seen, although if other pseudoscientific practices serve as an indication, K-Tape may be with us indefinitely. Notwithstanding, there is likely to be a potent placebo effect that some proponents will use to justify its continued use in the clinic. In fact, around 40 percent of athletic trainers and physiotherapists are already cognizant that K-tape only works via placebo. They use it anyway. Hence the brand’s estimated value of ~$300 million.

References

Kalron, A., and S. Bar-Sela. 2013. “A Systematic Review of the Effectiveness of Kinesio Taping–Fact or Fashion?” European Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine 49 (5): 699–709.