Study: Massage helps recovery at cellular level

And what could they use, as a fake, for a double-blind test? Shiatsu?

GrayMouser- Shiatsu has too much in common with the myriad approaches to sports massage to be 'fake' and a useful counter in a double-blind study. Probably the most beneficial approach would be to vary the strokes performed in a very rigidly defined way and then compare physiological results.

This has already been done in Europe, particularly in Russia/former USSR. Refer to "Therapeutic Massage: A Scientific Approach" and "Medical Massage" by R. Turchaninov, M.D. for a more thorough treatment of the studies performed.

Failon- The whole idea behind double-blind is to remove the placebo effect AND the evaluators' biases. If you can't design a double-blind for this type of research you don't know whether data is any good, and even with a double-blind your experiment may be designed with a particular bias. This is assuming the researcher doesn't want a specific result in the first place.