How To Use Space-Age Technology To Banish Heavy Legs Forever, Run Faster, Increase Nitric Oxide Production, Enhance Flexibility & More.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Show, Circulation is all throughout the body, right? So it's a systemic type situation. But when you have certain diseases and complications from those diseases, anything you can do to enhance circulation is very advantageous. So someone with diabetes with wounds on their legs that don't heal, for example, you can focus in on just trying to heal the wound, where the wound is, but the whole reason they have a wound to begin with is poor circulation. So if you can kick start the circulation, everything starts to get better. Question is, what's that next frontier for athlete performance? We're really seeing that that whole area, recovery and rejuvenation is really what's next. And we're really happy to continue to lead the charge on that front. He's an expert in human performance and.

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The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I think it was about six years ago, possibly even seven years ago now, in a tiny little hotel room lobby in Kona, Hawaii, that I met this guy named Gilad Jacobs. Gilad, Am I pronouncing your first name correctly?

Real close. Gilad. Gilad G as well.

Gilad is pretty close. What, what, what nationality is Gilad?

It's a Israeli name.

Okay, gotcha. That's what I, that's what I thought. But Gilad, I don't, I don't remember, I don't know if you remember this, but when I met you, you were holding like a big black box about the size of a shoebox, and it had these two big space agey looking boots kind of sticking out of it via these two air tubes. And I was filming video back then for Everyman Tri, a triathlon website that I believe is now somewhat defunct. But anyways, I managed to fumble my way into these boots and I sat in a chair there in the hotel lobby in Kona while the black box pumped air in and out of the boots. And back then it seemed like kind of a hacked together device and possibly a little hokey. And I wasn't sure whether or not it would actually work to make my legs more fresh. But since Then you've kind of come a long way with this little device that you showed up in Hawaii with six, seven years ago. And now it's called NormaTec. And it is something that a lot of people are using, like pro triathletes, you know, Craig Alexander, Chrissie Wellington, Jordan Rapp, Miranda carfrae. You've got a bunch of NBA and professional football players, pro cyclists, pro runners like Meb Kapowski and Ryan hall. And a bunch of these folks are using it ton of like CrossFit boxes, pro CrossFit athletes. So it's kind of seemed to take the world by storm. And I figured it was time to get you on a call and find out exactly how these boots work and what they do and what people can expect when they put them on. What do you think? You want to jump in and talk shop about normatex?

Yeah, absolutely, Ben. And appreciate the time today. Indeed. I think it was probably going back six or seven years ago, exactly where we met up. I think it was in the King Cam and off in Kona, and it was probably the first year that we were there. And back then we as a company, NormaTec, was just me starting off our sports division, really trying to figure out what kind of role we were going to have in athlete performance in the years ahead. And we had a few athletes who were using it. And the unit that you remember, the kind of larger than life shoebox with the boots and everything else, was our first generation equipment that has taken a completely different turn over the last few years with all the R D that we've put into it. But that was kind of how we got started. And the goal was to introduce compression as a way to help athletes recover. And what we quickly started to see was the feedback we were getting from the pro athletes at that top level was really quite astounding. Typically you'll have one or two athletes that are willing to do just about anything, but when every single athlete basically that we were trying the normatec on were giving us feedback and saying, yeah, I'm actually using it every day. Not just because you want me to use it, because I am using and I love it, and I need one, and I need one for my wife or for my husband or for my training partners, and you guys need to progress this technology. Six, seven years ago, we really were in the early infancy, so to speak, of this technology.

So whose idea was this? Whose idea was it to like put on boots that pump air in and out to compress your legs?

So the technology for external compression has been around for a long time. I mean, compression in general as an industry has been around for a long, long time. We going back 3,000 years ago, we used to mummify bodies in Egypt. And that concept of compression has evolved in one form or another over the last few millennia. In the 1960s and 70s, these compression pumps started to come on the market to help patients after surgery and problems that would come up as a result of surgery or injury as part of the rehab process. And my late mom, Laura Jacobs, was an MD, PhD, and founder of our company to help patients again with the problems. And when I came out of college, I was working for the company and I said, there's got to be some application in sports. She said, all right, kiddo, this is not my jam. Here's a unit or two and five grand, sink or swim kind of thing.

And so at that point, your mom was using this for what?

So you have a lot of stuff that goes on. I mean, in the end you have circulation is all throughout the body, right? It's all systemic type situation. But when you have certain diseases and complications from those diseases, anything you can do to enhance circulation is very advantageous. So someone with diabetes with wounds on their legs that don't heal, for example, you can focus in on just trying to heal the wound, where the wound is. But the whole reason they have a wound to begin with, one of the major reasons is poor circulation. So if you can kick start the circulation, everything starts to get better. And we started to get a lot of feedback from patients of all walks of life who were using it, whether it was women after breast cancer or patients after surgery that would have swelling, that this was a very effective means of what was going on. And I guess to get to your point in terms of kind of how we got started, it was my mom's brainchild and her brilliance to fuse her MD and her PhD disciplines together to say the way that we're compressing and massaging around a limb, leg, or an arm is not as effective as it can be. So what she did is she said, when you're out there and you're running to the bus stop as a regular old patient, or you're an athlete and you're trying to move as fast as you can on the course or on the bike or wherever you are, how does the body move fluids naturally? And if we can take those physiological mechanisms, the things that the body uses when you're healthy to move fluids, maybe we can put that into some kind of apparatus or shoebox, if you will. That can go ahead and help you while you're at rest.

So how does the body actually move fluids? Like if I've got a bunch of fluid in my face, feet, for example, and I'm not wearing a boot, or I'm not wearing a compression sock or something like that, how would my body normally get blood from my feet back up to my heart effectively?

So what's interesting is if you're just sitting there, it's actually not as easy as you want it to be. And that's why a lot of patients and individuals who are sedentary for a long time or non ambulatory, they're in a wheelchair. For example, we all know our loving grandparents who sometimes at that age have to sit in a wheelchair. They have these swollen, puddled ankles because you don't have the good blood flow going back, the venous return back to the heart. So when you're out and you're walking and you're healthy, your body's doing a whole bunch of different things to move the blood flow. And the three areas that we really zeroed in on, first is the calf muscle action. Your calf muscle is made up of two muscles, the gastrocnemius and the soleus. They call it the muscle complex. And as you walk and push off your, your toes, your calf muscle is contracting, pulsing if you will. And every time it pulses, it drives the fluid up north. And that's very important. So we in the Normatec have a patented massaging action that incorporates a pulsing action. 2, 3 seconds, pulse on, 2, 3 seconds pulse off. So that's the first part pulsing in the calf muscle. The second part is gravity wants to bring that fluid that you just pulsed up right back down. So in our veins and lymphatics in a normal body, we have one way valves in these channels and it kind of creates a directionality effect, kind of one direction up to the right part of the body, as opposed to going back down towards the toes. So in the Normatec, as you're pulsing over, let's say the knee, you're actually holding at a slightly higher pressure over the calf and the foot. And that's creating a one way valve effect. And then finally we have this concept in the body of a distal or far away from the heart release. So as we're pulsing in the quads, we're holding in the knee and the calf, that's creating the one way valve effect. And then we release way down low in the foot and that allows a rush of blood flow to enter back in. So we're getting the bad stuff out while getting the good stuff in all at the same time. And it also feels tremendous.

Interesting. Okay, so as far as my own use of these boots, I tend to put them on when I finish up my workouts for the day. I wear them almost every day now. And I'll sit there and I'll drink my glass of wine. Typically keep them on for about 20 to 30 minutes while I'm writing or reading. And one of the things I notice right when I put them on is they go through this cycle that I think, I think you call it the pre inflate cycle. What exactly is going on when they first start to kind of hum and wrap around my legs during that initial cycle?

Yeah, exactly. So one of the interesting engineering challenges that we had was, was how to get a really good fit for every single athlete. You have general sizes, right. You don't have the guys who are in the NBA. That's a very specific size. But even within triathlon, what do you do to make sure that every athlete gets the right fit? So when you first put the boots on, whether they were used 10 minutes ago or you haven't used them for a couple, Sheen is always going to go through a pre inflate cycle, as you mentioned, where it's going to custom contour the inside of the boot with air to your individual dimensions. And that way you get a custom fit every single time.

Okay, so it's basically filling it with air and detecting the size of my actual leg.

Absolutely.

Okay. And do the actual boots themselves come in a different range of sizes? Because, for example, like my boots go up to my hips, which I think is about how far they're supposed to go. But when someone orders a Normatec boot or a Normatec system, do they need to specify a certain size or send you their leg length? Yeah.

So with the technology of the pre inflate, we're actually able to get a lot of sizes in one, but we do have multiple sizes. Obviously, if you're a 4 foot 10 gymnast or on the shorter end of the spectrum, you're going to need a shorter boot than somebody who is in the 5, 4, 5, 5 to 6, 2 range. And then obviously we have, for those taller athletes that are out there, six, three, six, four and up, we have a tall size as well. And then also depending on how wide your leg is, the circumference, we can make accommodations for any size athlete, any size limb. But typically we have really good abilities to fit. Most athletes fit into our standard size and they go from there. And that was done by design.

Okay, gotcha. So, in terms of compression, there are compression socks, there are compression tights. There are even other boots that I've seen that are compression boots that have the air tubes coming out of them that bring air into the boots to compress. What is the difference between that type of compression and something like the NormaTec system?

So, as you pointed out in the beginning part of this podcast here, when we started, we did have this big, bulky shoebox, and the technology was in its infancy. So what happened was we started getting feedback that this was going to be a tremendous option and tool for athletes who are going through a problem. They just had an ankle sprain. They were going through an ACL repair. There was an issue that needed to be helped with compression to move fluids. And what started to happen kind of naturally was this feedback from the coaches, from the athletes, from the athletic trainers that they were using the NormaTec technology not just on problems, but also on athletes who just wanted to perform better. And that's kind of how we all got started here. And our specific technology of what's actually happening in the boot, when you have it connected on your legs, arms, and we also have hip pieces. That patented action to move the bad stuff out and get the good stuff in is so powerful, that massaging action, that not only one, we patented it, and two, it's so effective in so many different areas. So you can use it after an injury, you can use it after a hard workout. And in the case of many of the pro athletes, you can use it actually before practice session or before actual go time. So you can actually get the boots on, and it makes your legs feel great. And that's all, again, based on the patented action. So whether it's any other type of compression that's out there, be it a compression sock that typically maxes out at about the 30 millimeters of mercury pressure level. We start at 30 millimeters of mercury, go up to 110 millimeters of mercury. But it's not just how much pressure, it's the patented massaging action. And that's unique to the NormaTec system.

What do you mean, the patented massaging action?

So what we talked about earlier, the pulsating, the hold, the release, that action of what's happening in those zones with the air, how is it massaging?

Right.

There's a method to the madness. Not all massage is created equal, not all compression is created equal. So in order to move blood flow effectively in the body, we had to look at not Only how big the system is and the materials and what it's called. And those are the nice things about designing any product. You just have to be smart about it. But the real method to the madness is how it's actually moving fluids in the body. And that massaging technique that the Normatec has is so powerful and effective that it's actually what we patented. So it's kind of like Ben, you go to your doctor and he says, you know what? You're sick. You need some antibiotics. Go home and swallow a pill that's round. You look at him like he's crazy. But that's many times what we do in the world of compression, up until the Normatec came around. Well, I think I have this machine under my bench for the last 20 years. It says compression pump on the side. It should be good. Or I have these compression socks, or maybe just the calf sleeve. Let's put it on. It should be good. Well, how is it moving fluids? Well, no one really thought about that, and that's really where we came in and changed the game.

So it's the difference between just like squeezing a body part or squeezing a muscle for an extended period of time versus squeezing different sections of that muscle from the end of it up to the beginning of it in a pulsing pattern.

Exactly. So it's not just the squeezing in terms of the sequential action where you're starting below and you're kind of going up, but it's really all about that dynamic action. We're very dynamic beings when we're healthy, we're very dynamic as an athlete. When we're out there training or we're competing, how can we also be very dynamic about our recovery? And that's really, I think, one of the coolest things that we've seen over the last six years is not only development of the product, which we'll get into, and tell you about some of the exciting stuff that we have coming out for 2016. But in addition to that, every sport, endurance sports especially, looks at four pillars, if you will, to improve athlete performance legally. So up until now, the history books have shown that all the technology, the research and development has really been in four areas to improve athlete performance. One is coaching. That's a lot of what you do and what you preach on a regular basis. One is training, which is very important. One is nutrition, and the other is gear. So triathlon, for example, is a great example of that. The gear. There's so much time and effort focused on how do I improve my results based on my gear. And while that's great, we're now realizing that bikes aren't getting that much more aerodynamic because we've done all the research around it. Same thing with nutrition. We don't just carbo load before a big event anymore and then not take on any nutrition. Actually, during the event, we're smarter about our nutritional needs and how it actually interacts with our body and what demands we need to have there. Same thing with training.

Right.

We don't just run laps anymore until people drop. We're smarter about tapering, and we understand build sessions and strength and cardio and everything else that goes into it. Question is, what's that next frontier for athlete performance? And we're really seeing that that whole area of recovery and rejuvenation is really what's next, and we're really happy to continue to lead the charge on that front.

Yeah. I want to ask you about some of the studies that have been done on. This one was on flexibility. This one was in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research called Peristaltic Pulse Compression of the Lower Extremity Enhances Flexibility. What's the proposed mechanism of action there to where basically squeezing a muscle would increase the flexibility of it?

Yeah, you know, it's actually a great question. That study was done at the U.S. olympic Committee on U.S. olympians, where flexibility obviously is very important, but especially at that level, it was a pilot program. So it's actually something that we're going to continue to study. And there's a number of physiological mechanisms that actually are at work, but it looks like doing things to the muscle as you begin actually puts the muscle in a state where it can actually be more flexible. And if that doesn't really make sense, the researchers are still trying to parse it all out and figure out how it's actually working. But we know that when we stretch, we're doing things to the muscle to elongate and to kind of massage and to kind of soften, if you will. So we think that has a lot to do with the mechanisms in and around the enhancement and flexibility.

Interesting. Now, there was another one about pressure to pain threshold. Looks like this one was pretty recent in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research. What is pressure to pain threshold, and what would that have to do with recovery?

Sure. So pressure to pain threshold is really just an easy way of saying sometimes you feel pressure and sometimes you feel pain. This was also done, interestingly enough, at the U.S. olympic Committee and published, I think, in the summer this year. What's really interesting is if you look at the world of athletic performance. When you try to objectively measure recovery, it's really not an easy thing. Right? Wind tunnel testing is easy. You put the bike in there, you put an athlete or dummy on there and you see kind of what the properties are. But when it comes to recovery, there's a lot of subjective into play. Maybe you're recovering in a place that's air conditioned. Well, what effect does that have on the results? Maybe there's nutritional aspect. Maybe you liked your massage therapist more than the other massage therapist. So there's a lot of variables. So to try to limit the variables and measure recovery as effective as possible, they have this device that's been around for about 30 years now called a muscle algometer. And a muscle algometer looks like an old school ipod with a hard rubber tip, totally non, invasive, just something that you would use. And you push it down into the muscle belly. So let's say the quadriceps or the hamstrings, which is two of the areas that were done. I think the calf was done as well. And you push down and the athlete's like, okay, yeah, I'm feeling pressure, feeling pressure, feeling pressure. And then as soon as they feel pain, they say, mark. And you take a reading on this muscle algometer. And the idea is the more recovered you are, the more downward force you can apply before the athlete indicates pain. Right. And we feel this same thing. If you haven't worked out in a couple of days or you're feeling really good, you can go in and get a massage from your masseuse. And they can really usually work a little harder and longer on you if you're more sensitive because you're not recovered. You know that feeling of okay, wow, I'm actually, it hurts a little bit when you press. Don't press too hard. So that's an indicator of recovery. And that's why it was used to measure recovery and the effects of the Normatec.

Okay, got it. So biomechanically, we've got increased flexibility, we've got more pumping of blood and lymph flow and everything back out of the muscle tissue. And then we've got almost like this increased pain threshold that allows us to push harder. If we say, were to, let's say we use the boots before an exercise session or before a race or before game day. Now, what about biochemically? I noticed that there was another study that looked into nitric oxide synthase and something called PGC1 Alpha. Can you get into what those are and how the boots Affected those. Yeah.

So what's really interesting about that is we tend to really just look to the outside. A lot of times the body, you know, how are we doing, how are the muscles doing? How do they look? We're very visual beings. But what's fascinating is now that the science is allowing us to get a really good in depth look at what's happening actually underneath everything within the bloodstream and the chemicals that are going on in the body. And we are a big chemistry experiment as humans. And it's amazing all the various processes that are happening in the body in any given moment. So one of the naturally occurring chemicals in the body is. No. Or nitric oxide. Right. Not to be confused with nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas that you would get at the dentist's office before a root canal. But nitric oxide actually is released in the endothelial cells, which are the cells that line the walls of the arteries. And when this chemical is released, it actually acts as a vasodilator. It dilates or opens up the arteries. And an easy way to think about this is if you have a garden hose and you're trying to push water through it, you can push as hard as you want, but there's a limited amount of flow. Because the garden hose is a certain size, you now increase that garden hose just by a little bit, you're going to be able to get more blood flow going. So it's really the body's way. One of the body's ways to move blood flow more effectively is to release this chemical. And to some degree, it's kind of like this holy grail of how do we actually get this chemical to be released more often? You can't just say, okay, I want to release nitric oxide. Body go. And it turns out that the NormaTec actually is being successful at inducing this response of this nitric oxide release. So we're having a really interesting time to see kind of what are the bounds that we can actually push now that we can actually move blood flow more effectively through the release of this chemical.

Okay, so basically this Enos protein is going to cause vasodilation. What about the PGC1 Alpha? Is that doing the same thing or is that working on a different system?

So that's working on a different system, and that's actually something that we're continuing to study. It's just very fascinating what's happening. But I think, Ben, what you're getting into is exactly the point of this. Not just with the NormaTec. Are you feeling better? Which is great and very important. Not just is it doing things, the actual muscle, as we saw in some of these pressure to pain threshold and the stretching improvements, but we're also doing things on a biochemical level. And when you put this together, you really start to see the layout and the overall kind of view that this technology now, if you're able to get it on your legs on a regular basis, is going to help many different facets of your athletic performance, and not just one. So it's a constant adventure. Looking at what we're going to be looking at next. The good news is when we started, before we have had any of this data back in the Kona Hotel, we knew that something was up because athletes were liking it. And a lot of times this is how these things start. Athletes do something doesn't really make sense, we don't really understand why, and then the science starts to catch up to it. And that's exactly what's happened here in the case of the Normatec.

Now, you said you have hip attachments and arm attachments. How would a hip attachment actually work and what would one use that for?

So what's really interesting is, if you think about it, we have different things that happen to our bodies during workouts. So when you work out really hard, you go for a hard run, hard bike, hard swim, or whatever your discipline is, you're going to feel stuff in your hamstrings, and your quads, especially calves, are usually on fire the next day. And it's important to kind of really massage those areas. It's obviously something that's done all the time with massage therapists. But when you're getting off the bike and you're getting onto the run, you've been in a certain position for a long time. So your hip flexors, your glute meds, the top of your butt, all those areas need to kind of be stretched out and elongated. And a lot of people spend a lot of time, as I'm sure you do as well, foam rolling, getting work done in those areas. So I was watching a Boston Bruins hockey game. We're based in Boston, we love the Bruins. And I was like, wow, you know, these athletes a couple years ago, they're wearing these hockey pants to protect that area between their knees and their groin and basically to their belly button and lower back and hips and everything else. If they want to protect that area, maybe they want to recover that too. So we started looking at what aspects of the body that type of attachment kind of hit the hockey pins. And we Actually modeled it after it, and it feels tremendous. So not only are you getting the upper quads in your groin, you're getting the lower back, you're getting your obliques, you're getting that whole area that sometimes is unfortunately kind of left out. And you can do it in a way that's very effective. And that's probably the other thing that we find as well through the feedback from our athletes and our coaches, is that this is something that you could do in the privacy of your own home or with your friends and family while you're engaging in something else. You could be watching your favorite TV show. You can incorporate it very easily is the take home message. So even if you could afford massage every single day, which just about nobody can. Right. Not even at the Tour de France are they getting necessarily massages every single day, you're able to do this every day and not have it disrupt your routine. So I know you're a big time guy on the computer, you're on phones. You could be doing this while you're doing all of your work. Your kids can be climbing on you. And it can be something that's very effective. And in the end, not only does it have to work, but we have to be smart enough to know that all the pressures that we have on us today, it needs to be able to be easily incorporated into your routine.

Yeah. And with the hips and the low back attachment, does that actually go far enough up to where it would affect your lumbar spine, like your, you know, let's say after a long bike ride or something like that, soreness after, after an activity like that or after sitting all day, does it have like a decompression effect?

Yeah. So what's interesting is if you think about what's going on when the boots are on your legs or your arm sleeves, you have 360 massaging action. So take your calf, right? So it's massaging your calf. It's also massaging your shin. When you start talking about the lower back, you have to think about what's going on on the other side. So from your lower back, the higher you go up, well, you have, you know, your diaphragm starts to kind of hang out in that area. And when you start compressing over the diaphragm, you start to have some challenges with breathing, obviously. Right. Because it's going to affect what's going on with your breath. So you can go about as high up as the bottom of your diaphragm that's in the front. Because once you start compressing over that, it's somewhat uncomfortable.

Okay, got it. Now what about the arm attachments? What are people using those for or why did you design those?

Man, the arms are awesome. So just like with your legs, even though those are the largest muscle groups in your body and every athlete more or less will do something with their legs, we have a lot of athletes who focus for various reasons, whether it's part of your sport, like swimming, on the upper body. We also have certain efforts that athletes do that are very specific to the upper body. So a great example is a professional quarterback or baseball pitcher who really needs to make sure that their limbs are in the tip top shape. So when you have a swimmer that's going out there and they're doing their pull sets in the pool, being able to have the arms is going to help the arms recover, just like the boots are going to be able to help the legs recover as well. And it really just feels great.

I was actually thinking about myself and how much I do a lot of upper body work, pull ups, et cetera for obstacle course racing. But then I also do a lot of typing and spend a lot of time, you know, basically using my forearms during the day. Do these go as far down as the forearms or are they just the upper arms?

So we're really big on a full limb length attachment, whether it's arms or legs. We never really quite got those half boots or half arms that are out there, compression socks that don't really go up all the way. So this is gonna go from your fingertips all the way up to your shoulder. It's funny that you mentioned that you do obstacle course training, you would use it on that. But then also typing, one of the areas that we actually find somewhat funny when we first started, but obviously it's a very serious component of what we do now is massage therapists actually get these Normatec systems for their practice to be able to put the patients or their customers in before and or after massages. But then they'll use it on themselves, especially their hands that obviously get a workout in their profession at the end of the day to help themselves recover. So I wouldn't be surprised if you, you keep using the arms and your typing gets even faster.

Interesting. Okay, so are you guys going to eventually just get like a full body sleeve that you can basically climb into and lie inside like a, like a caterpillar?

That'd be pretty dope, huh?

Yeah, yeah. My kids have actually climbed inside my, my boots that I have. They can get their entire bodies Inside. I think I sent you a photo of that.

Yeah, it's pretty funny. And you should see some of the larger size boots. Obviously you're, you're a fit guy and fit into our standard boots, but some of the larger athletes that you have in professional football and some of the throwers that you have with track and field, they need an even wider and roomier fit boot. So being able to do that is pretty interesting. Kids can easily make that a sleeping bag, depending on how big they are.

Now you've got two different models. You have one called a Pulse and one called a Pulse Pro. What's the difference between those two?

So what you're seeing online now on normatechrecovery.com is the greatest. We launched the product at Kona this year and it was just awesome because we've been going there, as you mentioned in the beginning part of this podcast, for the last six, seven years. And when we started it was this kind of travel beauty, case size thing, if you will, like a very large shoebox. And believe it or not, the new unit technology is awesome. We spent a lot of time at normatech focusing not only on our technology of how to move blood flow in the body, but the technology that surrounds our equipment. So we're constantly pushing the envelope. And what we just came out with is this new Pulse series product. So the Pulse series, we have a more amateur level age group model, if you will, focused on recovery, and we have a professional model called the Nortek Pulse Pro. These systems, the control units, if you will, are literally a quarter of the size of the original system that you saw in Kona seven years ago. And that was our first generation, our second generation that we rocking for the last three to four years. The new system is half that size. So being able to focus on the aesthetics, getting the size and weight down, putting in batteries into it for continuous use, rechargeable lithium ion batteries, which is a lot of fun, and making it more accessible for people at a better price point is really what we're all about. So the two systems, the Pulse system is a non touch interface. You have this really great screen with buttons on the right and left that you can increase time, increase pressure. You can see what's going on at any given moment in the boot. Icons that are on the screen so you can see what zone is holding and releasing and pulsing and have the ability to get really awesome recovery with that. The Pro model is really available to pro teams and professional athletes. That has a four and a half inch beautiful full color touchscreen interface where you can select all kinds of customized options depending on what your situation is and what your needs are.

Okay, got it. So as far as the actual units themselves, are they something that you would consider to be somewhat portable? I mean, I know my unit right now it looks like it might be even a little bit larger than these newer units that you have set up. And I've traveled with it and had in the car and things like that. But are these even smaller, this Pulse and Pulse Pro? About what size would they.

Yeah, so the unit that you have right now, which is our second generation and we sold a lot of them, and athlete feedback has just been tremendous. About the size, I mean, would say, right? About a car battery size? Yeah, yeah, about a car battery size. So this new system is literally half the size. So imagine that it's more tapered and contoured and obviously looks a lot nicer too. We spent a lot of time and efforts researching kind of the look and the feel of the product because we wanted it to not only be very effective, but really be in line with what a professional and age group athlete comes to expect from their gear these days. You know, hit 2016 with a bang. So the system is half the size of the unit that you have. You can easily hold it in your hand to give you an idea of how big it is. The unit only weighs about three and a half pounds. So it's very manageable whether you're a younger athlete, older athlete, someone in the middle, male, female. We really built it so that everybody could really utilize it effectively, no matter what your age or background.

Okay, last question on your website. And by the way, for those of you listening in, I'll put a link to all this stuff if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com SpaceBoots BenGreenfieldFitness.com spaceboots you'll get a link to all the research and everything else that Gilad and I are talking about today. But on your website, you have a list of a whole bunch of different locations that people can go to either rent time to sit in a NormaTec recovery system, check them out, or buy them. And I noticed that in addition to, like, CrossFit facilities and bike shops all over the U.S. you've also got the boots in a few of these cryo chambers, like these cryo spas. Is there a way to actually combine these with ice? I've thought about before, like putting ice packs in targeted locations that are injured or especially sore after a workout, and then pulling on the Normatex over the ice. Is that ill advised or can you do something like that, like combine ice with the Normatex?

Sure. So you can do anything you want as long as it's feeling good. I mean, we're big proponents of that. What happens with the icing world? It's very interesting. Most of icing started out because of this term rice. You've heard of that Rice rest, ice, compression, elevation. So where did that come from? That actually came from an orthopedic surgeon who wrote his best selling New York Times novel or book, I should say, on sports injury and prevention in the 1970s. And on like page 78 or something like that, he coins the term rice for the first time. First time it ever showed up in the literature. Unfortunately, about a year ago, he's still around. His name is Dr. Gabe Merkin and he actually published a position paper saying that he was wrong. Rice and ice specifically was the best that what was out there back in the 70s. We know now actually that icing unfortunately is actually doing sometimes more damage than good and not as effective as we kind of wanted. So icing from that perspective, it feels great if you're injured or if you worked out really hard and you want to throw yourself into icing. But if you think about what's actually happening in a deep cryo, which is different than some of these cryo chambers, and we can talk about that as well, that you just mentioned that are on the website, it's limiting the blood flow coming from the heart, which is why everything kind of tightens up when you jump in an ice bath. Right? Everything kind of like shrinks up and tightens up around you with your skin because it's limiting the amount of blood flow. So what we do sometimes we do these contrast baths where you're jumping in cold and then a couple minutes later you're jumping in hot. And the idea is the cold tightens up on the vessels and the hot opens it up and then back and forth, you actually do that motion with your hands, the opening and closing. That's actually going to go ahead and mimic kind of what the Normatec does, clamping down and then releasing around you. So by actually not incorporating ice and focusing on how to massage with the air, we get unbelievable results. Now, some of these cryo spas that are setting up again, it's very much in line with the industry trend that we're seeing, which is a move towards regeneration and recovery, which is very important.

Yeah, I wrote about that in my book a little bit actually, about how Icing should, should ideally be always combined with compression to prevent some of that backflow. Right.

And there's really just not a lot of research that's out there at all that talks about how icing with compression is more beneficial than just compression. And Obviously now with NormaTec style compression that we patented, we're getting even better results. So it's kind of a new school thought on an old school technique, and more research obviously needs to be done. But if you look at what the pro and college teams are doing, we go into these training rooms and facilities every day of the week with our staff to make sure that the normatex are getting the use that they need to be getting and answering all the questions that they have. And you really see them kind of moving away from traditional kind of old school icing.

Yeah. Interesting. Well, I'll continue to drop ice into the normatex when I use them then occasionally it seems to be working quite well. Like I mentioned, folks, if you want to check out these booths for yourself, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com space boots because there I not only have a link with a nice discount for you on a set of boots for yourself, but also a link to some of this research that's been done in the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research and also the Journal of Experimental Physiology and the European Journal of Applied Physiology on these boots. I generally don't tend to spend much time messing around with stuff that hasn't been proven by science to actually work. And so I appreciate that these things not only make my legs feel light as a feather, but it's also not just a placebo. So check out the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com SpaceBoots and Gilad. I'm hoping to perhaps see you in Kona in 2016. You plan on going back?

Absolutely. Every year we seem to have a bigger and bigger presence and we're actually Ironman partners for their US series for 2015 and 2016, which has just been a. A really great opportunity for us and continues the trend of excellence and athlete performance in Ironman and the 70.3 series. So it's been a lot of fun and we're looking forward to what's next.

Sweet. All right, well, folks, like I said, you can get yourself a fat discount on these things if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com SpaceBoots and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Gili Jacobs from Normatec Boots, signing out from the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast have a great week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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