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Why LeBron’s Hyperice Normatec boots are a game-changer
LeBron James is said to spend upwards of $1.5 million per year on health and nutrition.
It’s an investment, he says, in himself, his career, and his legacy. And a stunning one when you do the math, ringing in at a little more than $4,000 a day. How, exactly, does a person spend $4,000 daily on his health and wellness?
About five years ago, I thought I’d found the answer. It was the heart of the NBA season and LeBron was in the midst of (another) statistical tear when I opened Instagram and spotted a photo. James was wearing what appeared to be the legs to an astronaut suit, fully inflated and extended out over a long table. Outside of images from NASA, I’d never seen a product like it before. I didn’t know where it was from. I didn’t even know how to Google it. But I was fascinated.
A few years later, my girlfriend Jamie decided to run the Chicago marathon. When it came time to book accommodations for race weekend, we decided on the Westin River North because we’d heard about a “runner’s club” program operated by the hotel chain at each of the six “major” marathons. Westin, we were told, invested thousands in the latest-and-greatest tech for runners, which “runner’s club” guests at the hotel were free to use at their leisure throughout race weekend.
On our first day there, I walked down to the lobby and saw it. The space pants — Lebron’s space pants — sat empty next to a strange-looking lawn chair. With no competitive plans for the weekend other than deep dish and light beer, I turned to Jamie.
“Do you mind if I try?’
Five minutes later, I was strapped in. And as the pants inflated and my chair tilted back, I learned for the first time about the product that had fascinated me years earlier. Not space pants but Normatec Compression Boots — a still-new piece of recovery technology revolutionizing the way athletes managed their health. The pants were essentially big balloons, an on-site PT told me, trained to inflate and deflate in highly specific ways to promote blood flow and speed up recovery. The secret sauce was something called dynamic compression technology, which encouraged circulation of the legs, flushed lactic acid and metabolic waste, and mimicked a natural muscle “pump.”
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As my “cycle” continued, rhythmically squeezing my feet, calves, knees and thighs, I looked around the lobby. Twenty other pairs of NormaTec Boots lined the area, each with its own zero-gravity chair. I turned back to the PT.
“They must have spent a fortune on this,” I said, remembering LeBron’s $1.5 million bill.
“Actually, they probably spent less than you think,” she said.
As it turned out, she was right. True to my memory, Normatec’s technology had sparked a revolution in high-level professional sports, particularly in the NBA, about five years earlier. At the time, the boots cost a fortune, and the technology they promised was still very much space-age, but stars like LeBron were early adopters. Soon, the rest of the league took notice, with players eager to lessen the stress of an 82-game season of sprinting and jumping on their joints. The popularity helped plans materialize to turn the boots into a full-fledged consumer product, which was how Westin had eventually gotten into the game.
“Lots of people actually just … own these,” the PT said.
I laughed then. But I wasn’t laughing 15 minutes later, when my 30-minute “cycle” ended. I’d gotten off a transcontinental flight from the Ryder Cup two days earlier, then hopped on another flight to Chicago that morning. And yet, as I took in the lobby flexing my legs, I felt positively springy. The feeling lingered for the rest of the day. After a pre-marathon jog the next morning, I stumbled through the lobby to see lines of runners forming in front of the boots. I didn’t have to imagine their relief, I saw it on Jamie’s face.
“That rocks,” she said.
The months that followed that first experience flew by, but my memory of the boots did not. Evidently, the same could be said for Jamie, who was still running and suddenly sharing LeBron’s eagerness to remove some stress from her legs. As the spring arrived, I went on a golf trip, playing 36 holes per day with some of my coworkers. I went to bed each night with my knees aching, silently dreaming I could get an afternoon “cycle” with the boots on.
Thankfully, with another marathon (and golf trip) looming, I don’t have to wait too much longer. Normatec is dropping the price of their boots for Black Friday by $100, and while the cost is still very much nosebleed, it’s not quite a $1.5 million nosebleed. As far as I’m concerned, that’s well worth the benefit for a pair of highly active walkers (golf) and runners (marathons).
Now if you don’t mind, I have a Turkey Trot to recover from.
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