Technology has long been an athlete's secret weapon.
Searching for the slightest competitive edge,
the best players across sports are willing guinea pigs,
and companies from the Fortune 500
to Silicon Valley startups know it.
Tens of billions of dollars are spent every year
on everything from the newest shoe, to wearables,
to Big Data-driven apps.
But one of the biggest technologies
to emerge in sports over the last decade
is aimed at doing something you don't traditionally see
in the classic training montage.
Recovery technology aims at helping athletes
bounce back from the intense training
and activity their bodies go through,
and make the most of those high octane workouts.
You do not get stronger that moment
that you're lifting the barbell.
You get stronger as your body is making repairs,
making recovery.
Recovery is a win and how you get fitter, faster, stronger.
Recovery technology includes everything
from massage guns and foam rollers, to compression boots,
hyperbaric chambers, cryo chambers, infrared saunas,
and even infrared pajamas.
And athletes are partnering to become investors
to take those products mainstream.
When you look at tech and sports right now,
it's completely innovating the way training's going.
Completely changing the way recovery's going.
I think sky's the limit as far as where it can go.
But while some of these products
can feel amazing, it can be difficult to differentiate
between what really helps the body
and what just tricks the mind.
So many of these things end up not holding up.
Every time you're chasing the latest, greatest, newest tool,
you're probably chasing a mirage.
So I'm a former D1 athlete myself,
and nearly a decade ago, recovery looked
a lot different than it does now.
We made sure to recover from injuries.
But for professional athletes who have made it
their job to keep their bodies operating at peak performance
even into their late 30s and sometimes 40s,
recovery is touted as one of the most important tools
to both prevent injury and elongate their careers.
I feel like it makes me feel better
and helps me recover faster.
This is an opportunity for me to take care of my body.
No pain, no gain.
Recovery has also been
a big source of business for athletes.
While many athletes have appeared
in marketing for various products,
many are also making direct investments into them as well.
Including All-Pro running back Christian McCaffrey,
who not only uses products created by company Hyperice,
but he became an investor in the business itself.
When I first started talking with everyone from Hyperice,
I had actually been a fan
of the product myself for a long time.
I think the biggest thing you get
when you're dealing with recovery
and the biggest thing that athletes want is convenience.
Obviously, having suffered a few injuries
these last two years, it has been very tough.
And having products like Hyperice have been huge for me
not just being able to recover and come back quickly,
but also in training in general
and just staying at the top of my game at all times.
Christian and other athletes have pointed
to the convenience factor of these products.
Giving them the ability to work on their own bodies
outside of a training room.
The amount of recovery that you can do is limitless.
You don't have to be in the training room 24/7
to be able to recover.
You can kinda take ownership of that
at your house as well,
and not just sit there in soreness and say,
well, hopefully I feel good tomorrow.
No, I can do something about it now
because I have something in the palm of my hand.
In 2020, the NFL made Hyperice
their official recovery technology partner.
Following investments from athletes like Patrick Mahomes,
J.J. Watt, Jarvis Landry, and McCaffrey,
players have been investing more and more
in other technologies as well.
Some with clearly questionable scientific support.
Tom Brady's sleep pajamas, for example,
rely on infrared technology that they claim
helps promote better sleep.
But not only is this not approved by the FDA,
the best studies for such technology
come from experiments with rats.
Still, recovery's importance for athletes
has led it to become a big business.
Hyperice is one of few major brands
that have taken recovery tools used by professional trainers
and elite athletes and marketed them for everyone.
Hyperice has partnered with some
of the largest sports brands,
and is estimated to be valued around $1 billion.
One of their biggest competitors in the space is Therabody.
The company that created the original Theragun,
which was made by this guy, Jason Wersland.
2007, I was in a motorcycle accident.
As a chiropractor, I knew the things that I needed
and most of them were in my office, in my practice.
And I can't bend, bundle 'em up, and take 'em with me
so I just went to my garage and I grabbed some tools
and brought 'em in and I started messing around with them,
and I just made something and I started using it on myself.
And when I tell people that it worked,
meaning the pain stayed away for minutes,
20 minutes at a time.
As long as I had it on my body, I could tolerate the pain.
To say the least, that first prototype
was not a consumer facing device.
But the principal idea, what's known as percussive therapy,
was there from the beginning.
Percussive therapy as a concept
has been around for centuries.
You can see it in a Swedish massage technique
known as tapotement, where hands and fingers
are used to rhythmically drum on the body.
Here in the 1920s, you can see a similar
percussive therapy device.
This stuff's been around since the '40s and '50s.
I mean, they used to take like a blender sort of design
that had an up and down motion to it,
and the doctors would use that on a patient.
Wersland would begin to tweak
his original design and started to use his device
on other patients facing similar pain.
He contends that three factors
in the design of the Theragun were key.
The amplitude, or the depth the massage ball
would move up and down.
The frequency, the number of times per second
it could move up and down, and the torque or stall force.
How much pressure you could apply
before the motor would stall?
The result, Therabody claims, will increase blood flow
and relieve tension and pain temporarily
in the treated area.
Something that Wersland initially found useful
in treating patients in pain.
So how did it go from like kind of working on injuries
to I want to do this almost, you know,
every day to stay healthy?
Yeah. Yeah.
So I would actually treat athletes, celebrities,
and they would take my product when I wasn't there
and they would take it out on the gym floor.
I would get so mad at them and I asked one of them,
what are you doing?
And he said, oh dude, this makes my...
I don't get sore.
And so as he's telling me this I'm thinking,
holy crap, I didn't even realize that.
Therabody would launch
their first product in 2016,
but that was before any scientific research
could be done on the product.
The Theragun got out way before we could do studies.
That was a tough thing for me
because I was trying to hold it back,
waiting to get some validation.
Theragun would use athlete testimonials
to help sell those early products to both other athletes,
and anyone else who believed it could help.
And made headlines when during the 2017 NBA finals,
Kyrie Irving was spotted using one on the sidelines.
But with attention came many companies
looking to compete in the space.
Today, a simple Amazon search can reveal
the multitude of devices on the market.
Some at a tenth of the price of current Theraguns.
In 2020, Theragun would rebrand to Therabody,
and the company would expand into other recovery products.
Continuing to take equipment
that originated in training rooms,
and bringing them to the general population.
It's also opening locations like this, called Reset.
The idea for Reset came from us seeing
these things behind doors,
and not allowing the general population to experience it.
We couldn't like ignore it.
This room is our Theragun and stretch room.
So if you were here today, I would take these two
and I would treat your body-
At the same time.
Yes, it's called a double gun sweep.
The location allows you to choose
from a menu of sorts for recovery.
Allowing you to experience both Therabody products
used by their staff, but also products
you typically wouldn't see outside of elite training rooms.
Things like a red light table, hyperbaric chambers,
and a cryo chamber.
I'm gonna open this just to give you the effect of it.
Oh, lordy, lordy.
Yeah.
It's set for two minutes and 30 seconds.
It's not that long.
Are you gonna try this?
Now, I'm not one to back down from a challenge.
So I put on some protective equipment for my hands and feet,
and stood inside the chamber
at negative 141 degrees Fahrenheit.
While the Jonas Brothers blasted in my headphones
to help keep my mind from freezing
for the two and a half minutes, I couldn't help but wonder.
Is all of this technology aimed
at recovering our bodies worth this?
Little frost on your eyelashes.
Athletes should be prioritizing recovery
in the same way that they prioritize training.
It's that important.
This is Christie Aschwanden.
A journalist, and author of the book, "Good To Go,"
where she wrote about the science of recovery.
I read hundreds probably close to a thousand
scientific research articles
while I was working on the book,
looking at all sorts of these things.
And I can just say having done that
and having interviewed hundreds of researchers,
that there's not a lot of evidence
that this stuff does much.
Professional sports teams spend millions,
if not billions of dollars each year
in various sports science fields.
Players themselves also invest heavily on their own health.
LeBron James reportedly spends about
$1.5 million on his body every year.
I want this stuff to work.
I'll tell you what, you know, I was willing to try anything
while I was working on this book.
I tried almost all of these major recovery techniques
that are being marketed now for recovery,
but what I found is that most of them
if they made a difference, the difference was very marginal.
Including, unfortunately for me, cryotherapy.
In her book, Christie points to research
that couldn't establish any evidence of recovery benefits
in whole body cryotherapy.
The FDA would also put out a consumer warning
about the lack of evidence for the treatment,
and warned of potential risks.
You wanna see it?
Are you sure you wanna see it?
Frostbite is reportedly to blame
for sidelining Antonio Brown.
He reportedly went to France last month
to undergo cryotherapy.
The source says he didn't wear the proper footwear,
and as a result, his feet were frostbitten.
Despite this, elite teams around the world
continue to use cryotherapy.
In 2021, the Dallas Cowboys even announced
an official cryo partner.
There's really good evidence for some things
that really do help recovery.
It's sleep, it's stress reduction.
These are things that, you know,
are very hard to commercialize, very hard to monetize.
What we're seeing now though, is sports leagues
you know, everyone wants to keep up with everyone else.
And when you see your competition using this new device,
you think, well, we have to do that too
because what if it works?
And so it's not even about the science necessarily,
it's about the culture of this is what everyone's doing now
so we'd better be doing it.
When it comes to devices like massage guns,
the amount of research is still relatively small.
Some studies of recovery technology products have concluded
they show beneficial effects.
But while the industry has touted such findings,
the studies generally use small samples
and often themselves call for the need for more research.
Some are also not peer reviewed.
The quality of the science
in a lot of fields of sports science is pretty low,
and this is not to slam researchers,
it's that these studies are really hard to conduct.
It's difficult particularly if you're looking
at elite athletes.
I mean, you tell me how you're gonna do a study
where you take elite athletes
and you ask them to change something
so that you can study it.
They're not gonna do that.
Most of these studies are very small,
and so the results that they get aren't very reliable.
There's a lot of uncertainty in them
so I think we just have to be very careful.
Now this is changing.
I think there's a growing recognition now
that there needs to be more rigor applied
to these sorts of studies.
It's not an easy nut to crack.
It's hard to get bigger sample sizes
for some of these studies.
Conclusive, scientific research takes time.
And with new devices coming out every year
and eager athletes willing to try,
it may be a while before we could definitively understand
what products are actually doing to your body.
But it's important to know
that while there may not be conclusive, scientific evidence
of physiological gains from recovery devices,
that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't effective,
especially when it comes to the mind.
I don't wanna be too dismissive of this stuff.
You know, some of these massage tools feel really good,
and that's worth something.
It really is.
And if you feel better using these massage tools,
I say go for it.
The placebo effect is often sort of dismissed
as something that's no good,
but I think that it's something that we can, in some cases,
really, you know, harness for good.
I wanted to come to a place
where these types of devices were being used.
Here at the University of Pittsburgh,
athletic trainers work to take care
of the student athletes holistically.
You'll see many of the same devices here
that are used by the staff.
But as they explain, they're working not just
to treat students' bodies, but their minds as well.
There's more than one thing that we do.
Not a lot, but there are some things that we do
that are for the placebo effect to make someone think
we're doing something.
You know, there's something to be said for rest.
This is Jennifer Brown, the senior associate
athletic director for sports medicine
at the University of Pittsburgh.
And she oversees all areas of performance
including nutrition, strength and conditioning,
as well as mental health.
Rest and recovery is so important,
and the more we do this, the more we realize
the importance of those.
Athletes are competitive.
They wanna know what they do to get better.
Some of them thinks it's go, go, go, go, go.
Well, we know if you keep going and keep going,
no matter who you are, at some point in time,
something's gonna break.
And do you think that's where some of that
recovery placebo tech can come in
where you're trying to get them to understand
that they need to rest?
So it's like let's bring this thing in
that makes them think that that's what's happening.
Like, they're still doing something
but it's actually just helping them rest a little bit?
Absolutely.
There's a lot of times where we're like, hey, do this.
It's for nothing else than to have them sit down.
They don't like the concept of doing nothing
and completely resting.
And so what can we do that seems like something
and that is helping them in some way,
but isn't too much or too taxing.
I would say the vast majority of these products
that target recovery are really just giving athletes
something to do while they wait for their bodies
to recover on their own naturally.
You know that happens whether you use these devices or not.
But as Jennifer explains,
that time isn't just useful for their body health.
The mental side of the game
is something companies like Hyperice
are already interested in.
In 2021, Hyperice bought the mental wellness company, Core.
LeBron has also gotten in the game
and partnered with Calm to create content
meant to promote mental fitness.
You know, when I was growing up or, you know,
some of our coaches,
we talked about, mental health had a stigma to it.
You had a mental illness.
Do we really talk about that?
Well, that has changed.
We certainly have people that are mental health therapists,
and social workers, counselors, psychiatrists,
psychologists, that that's their training.
But, you know, as athletic trainers or, you know,
even coaches or our, you know, academic advisors,
we're all talking to students
and it's just, you know, caring about them,
making sure we are genuine, making sure we're,
you know, asking people how are you?
How are you?
And listening, not just passing in the hallway,
but like actually listening to what they say.
Not judging them.
Everybody's perception is different, but to each individual,
what they perceive is what matters to them.
What might work for one player mentally
could be different for another,
and the same is true when it comes to recovery technology.
It's all about making sure they feel good.
While our most popular games have been played
nearly the same way for decades,
everyone from coaches to players, to owners,
to your average enthusiast is always looking
for the next competitive edge.
And technology will always be there
to provide at least the chance for the next big advantage.