Good to Go

Good to Go — summary

A bathtub full of red wine and the question nobody asked

In 2015, NBA star Amar'e Stoudemire posted a selfie from inside a bathtub filled with red wine. He called it his "recovery day." The internet lost its mind. Google searches for "vinotherapy" jumped 90 percent in a week. A year later, swimmer Michael Phelps walked onto the pool deck at the Rio Olympics with circular purple bruises all over his shoulders, the calling card of a Chinese practice called cupping. Within hours, suction cups were sold out across the United States. Nobody, anywhere, stopped to ask the obvious question: does any of this actually work?

That is the question journalist Christie Aschwanden, a serious recreational athlete in her forties, decided to investigate. She visited an entire industrial park outside Denver dedicated to "recovery": pneumatic boots that squeezed her legs, electric stimulation pads stuck on her hamstrings, vibration plates promising to flush her lactic acid. She spent more than an hour recovering from a 45-minute beer run. She climbed naked into a steel chamber pumped with liquid nitrogen at minus 210 degrees Fahrenheit. She tried Tom Brady's $200 infrared pajamas. She drifted in a sensory deprivation tank in San Francisco. Then she did something almost no athlete bothers to do anymore: she opened the actual research and asked whether the science backed any of it.

Her conclusions, in her book Good to Go, are bracing and a little funny. The recovery industry has ballooned into hundreds of millions of dollars on the back of stories, celebrity selfies, and studies with eight male volunteers. Most of the gadgets do nothing measurable. Some are actively counterproductive. And the one tool that genuinely works, the one with mountains of evidence behind it, costs nothing and is available to everyone. We will get there. First, we have to understand why we ever stopped trusting our own bodies.