The recovery industry makes money from the periphery because the centre is free.
You can charge for a massage gun. You can charge for cryotherapy. You can charge for compression boots, contrast protocols, percussion devices, weekly ice-bath subscriptions. You cannot charge for eight hours of sleep. You cannot charge for a glass of water. You cannot put a deload week in a subscription box. So the periphery is where the marketing budget went. And the periphery is what people fix first — which is how most people end up stacking £4,000 of recovery hardware on top of five hours of sleep and a protein deficit, then wondering why their wearable is still red.
Inside this one
- The intensity boundary between active recovery and accidental training
- What DOMS is — and the four things it isn't
- The evidence map for the major recovery modalities
- Cold water immersion — when it helps and when it attenuates adaptation
- Sauna — what the evidence supports, what it doesn't
- The Recovery Hierarchy Principle in practice
The standard it is held to
Every factual claim in this volume names its source, and every claim carries a confidence grade — settled, strong, emerging or contested. Where the evidence is thin, the text says so. How it’s made, in full → · What we’ve got wrong →