Are Recovery Boots Worth The Investment

Audio Transcript

Danny: Hello podcast listeners. This is coach Danny with you today. We have a question from Dan today.

Dan: Good morning Runners Connect coaches and listeners. I have a question about the air massage recovery systems, such as the Nordic Tech Pulse.

Are they worth the money? It’s a hefty price tag but if it greatly increases recovery, as they claim, then it would definitely be worth the price for certain people.

I was wondering if you guys had any experience with them. Thank you for your time.

Danny: First off, it’s important to generalize and review how our muscles and body recovers. On a cellular level, we train and we break down our muscle tissue and recover by increasing blood flow to that injured area, and recovering and resting the injured area.

What these boots claim to do is increase the speed of that recovery by manipulating blood flow through the leg, by a series of pulses and holds.

They call them holds, which is basically a static hold on different parts of the lower leg, increasing blood flow to and from different parts of the lower leg.

In my opinion, as with any other form of a recovery or way of increasing the speed of recovery, a lot of it has to do with psychological aspects of it, in the mindset you have towards different modes of recovery.

What I mean by this is that for me, an ice bath and a sauna are the two major things that I like to do after a hard workout and feel like I can bounce back the next day and get a run in or a bike in.

Those are two things that prepare me for my next hard workout. For other people, that might not be the case.

Some people like to use the recovery boots, or don’t do anything at all, or don’t have the same effects from an ice bath, and that might be based on how we perceive different recovery protocols than what the actual recovery protocols are doing.

With that being said, I think the NormanTech Air Recovery boots do a great job of flushing out the waste product or increasing the blood flow away from our lower legs, allowing fresh blood flow with a dense amount of nutrients to overwhelm the muscles and increase the speed of recovery.

However, I think flushing out the waste product that the boots do, is just half the solution.

You still need to get some form of active recovery or mobility in the legs, to increase blood flow back into the lower legs; into the calves, and shins, and quads, and stuff like that.

You can do that through walking, doing stuff around the house like garden work, or even going for a short easy recovery jog.

A very slow easy recovery jog warms up the muscles, gets them moving, gets them flexing and squeezes out any waste product in there, then they relax to allow more fresh blood flow in there.

Getting your heart rate up is going to increase blood flow rate in there and that’s going to increase recovery over time.

Recovery boots are not just about, this is what you need and that’s all you need to recover. You still need to focus on other aspects of good sound recovery and that would be; how are you feeling?

What’s your nutrition like outside of the workout, outside of those recovery zones?

Speaking of feeling, right after a workout within the first 30 minutes, within an hour, those are good targets to hit and focus on what you’re doing in those.

You also want to focus on good sound nutrition the other 23 hours of the day that you’re not training.

Training load also is going to play a factor. Just because you are using recovery boots and you feel like they’re working on the recovery set of things, it doesn’t mean you can jump up in volume from 20 miles to 40 miles to 50 miles within a month.

You still have to use sound technique and sound methods when it comes to increasing training load with volume and intensity.

That’s all I have today and I hope that answers your question, Dan.

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Thanks for listening to the show today and have a great run.