How we choose what goes in the shop
Recovery hardware is a category full of things that arrive impressive and end up in a drawer. Almost everything we looked at failed on one of four counts, so those four became the list.
It works without a phone
No app, no account, no firmware, no Bluetooth pairing. Every device here runs on its own buttons and will still run on them in ten years, when whoever made it has stopped writing software for it.
It survives being left out
The tool you can see is the tool you use. Everything we stock is meant to live on the floor by the sofa rather than in a box under the bed, so it has to look like an object you can stand to have in the room.
It does one job properly
We don't stock the massager with a heat setting and a speaker and a step counter. A roller rolls. A ball digs. A wrap gets warm. Anything that does four things does none of them well enough to earn the shelf.
It comes with a number
Every product page states a dose — how long to spend and where. If we can't say that plainly, we don't understand the tool well enough to sell it to you.
Sorted by when, not by what
Most recovery shops file things by shape — rollers here, guns there. That tells you what a thing is and nothing about when to pick it up. Ours is filed by the four jobs a session does, in the order it does them, and by the two things that bracket it: what you put on your hands before the first rep, and the night that does the actual repair.
See the session- Before
- GripOn a heavy pull your hands quit before your back does. What's on them decides how much of the set you finish.
- 0–4 min
- WarmRaise the temperature of the tissue before you ask anything of it.
- 4–12 min
- WorkPercussion and point pressure, on the muscle that actually complained.
- 12–16 min
- FlushLong strokes and compression, over more of the muscle than the point work reached.
- 16–20 min
- SettleStatic holds and something to lie on while the session lands.
- After
- SleepTwenty minutes is the short part. The long part is the eight hours after it, and this is the shelf for those.
Tell us where you're tight
We'd rather send you away with one thing that helps than four that don't. Say what hurts and when, and we'll answer with a single recommendation.