Everyone is an athlete these days. From sauna culture and infrared light to hydration salts and protein goals, our obsession with wellness has been recast to longevity — train harder to live longer, and optimize everything in-between. A core part of that optimization is recovery, opening up a new category for brands to cash in.
Last month, Nike released Mind 002, the second neuroscience-based footwear innovation from its Nike Mind Science Department, which is researching how to incorporate the body’s neurological system into tech-enabled footwear and apparel that optimizes performance and recovery. For the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, Nike ACG (its performancewear sub-brand) teamed up with recovery tech giant Hyperice on a limited-edition pair of compression therapy boots in ACG’s signature bright orange that were provided to elite athletes as they flew to France and Italy. The boots help to improve circulation and lower blood lactate levels, reduce soreness, and accelerate recovery between events.
Adidas also kitted out elite athletes in its new Climawarm System pre-warming suit, which integrated heating pads into the fabric placed strategically on major power muscle groups. Similar to the Hyperice boot, Adidas’s tech functioned as an adaptive system that responds to the wearer’s movement and ambient conditions, so that athletes can stay warm in the critical period between the warm up and the event in the extreme cold. According to Adidas’s SVP of innovation Marc Makowski, recovery is “increasingly a performance battleground” that the brand’s design team is prioritizing.
Sports and recovery tech brands test their products on elite athletes first for proof of concept and to build legitimacy — both Nike and Adidas’s Winter Olympics activations were not available for retail purchase. Yet the real commercial opportunity stems from subsequent releases to everyday consumers, who are paying between $150 and $5,000 for the latest at-home and portable devices that promise to optimize their recovery as part of daily wellness routines. We know — and are trackings — more about our bodies than ever, creating white space for new products to support and respond to that data.
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At the same time, science-backed recovery technology that uses percussive therapy, heat, light, and compression to support the body’s natural healing processes has rapidly advanced in the last couple of years. Recovery has moved from sports performance to holistic wellness, and analysts forecast this trend will drive rapid industry growth. It’s now a core part of the global sports technology market, which is projected to grow from $39.6 billion in 2026 to 192.3 billion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights.
Brands like Nike, as well as specialists such as Therabody, are betting on consumer appetite only increasing in this space, even as some worry about the implications of sharing their health data with big companies. To these companies, the next frontier of recovery tech is even more personalization. They’re designing recovery tools, smart devices, and apparel that can be tailored to the customer’s body, with neurosensory design and wearables connectivity to enable a full sensorial experience — “empathetic tech” that responds to the body’s natural cycles.
“Most technology is in some way empathetic in that it has a profound effect on your body, staring at screens, and now your thumbs are more dextrous than your index finger. But when we think about empathetic technologies in terms of sports innovation, it’s about how we can help you feel better, perform better, look good, and feel good,” says Matt Nurse, Nike’s chief science officer.
Recovery as part of a holistic routine
Category incumbents say that business has ramped up in recent years thanks to a fortuitous mix of technology improvements and consumer demand beyond professional athletes. “Since the post-Covid boom, the landscape has matured considerably,” says Tim Roberts, chief science officer of LA-based recovery tech brand Therabody. Where the early surge in consumer interest four years ago brought a flood of products to market, from muscle massagers to heating pads, Roberts says the most popular brands in 2026 are those that have invested in clinical research to validate product efficacy, and provide extensive data-based detail on their product specs — both of which the consumer is seeking out before they buy.
“The landscape is evolving by creating more diverse technologies to meet the unique needs of a much broader range of users,” he says. “Consumers are more sophisticated now. They want to know why something works, not just that it does.”
Therabody was founded in 2008, and its Theragun massager went on the market in 2016. It’s raised $165 million in venture capital — including from early backer Maria Sharapova — since its first funding round in 2020. Over time, it expanded its product range beyond massage via a string of strategic acquisitions of smaller companies to include compression, light therapy and heat therapy devices, as scientific evidence and growing support from the medical community for the two latter techniques has increased over the last few years.
Consumers have also learned that the same mechanisms of light therapy that aid muscle recovery also promote cellular health and skin rejuvenation — in the four months ended January, searches for “red light therapy” surged by 123% on TikTok, according to the platform. Roberts says this led Therabody to expand into LED facemasks and heat therapy wands for facial depuffing in 2023 — adjacent categories that are growing the business significantly, too.
“What’s been especially interesting over the past 12 months is how quickly the category has moved from early adoption into more mainstream awareness — particularly as it expands beyond performance into areas like skin health and overall wellbeing,” Lucas Wasniewski, CEO of Swedish recovery brand Flowlife, says about red light therapy. “Overall, what we’re seeing is a shift toward more holistic, at-home recovery tools, where people are building consistent routines rather than relying on one-off treatments.” Where the recovery sector was initially focused on sports injury prevention and performance, Wasniewski says it now sits at the intersection of “performance, beauty, and longevity”.
One of the biggest companies in the sector, Hyperice, has built credibility through brand collaborations with Nike, strategic investments from the NBA, the MLB and the NFL, and high-profile athlete investors like Naomi Osaka, Erling Haaland and Patrick Mahomes. The brand has expanded from massage guns to compression therapy and wearable heat devices, growing from $350,000 in annual revenue in 2013 to over $1 billion in cumulative revenue over the last six years, which CEO Jim Huether credits to broader adoption beyond elite sport into fitness, hospitality, and everyday consumers. “It started out as recovery, before moving into human performance optimization, and now it’s extending more into wellness and longevity,” says Huether.
The next frontier: Recovery apparel and footwear
Huether says that now, the big growth opportunity for the company is tech-enabled footwear, via its recent collaboration with Nike. The two companies released their first collaborative product, the Nike x Hyperice Hyperboot, in May 2025 — a battery-powered high-top shoe priced at $899, which is designed to accelerate warm up and recovery via heat and a dynamic air-compression massage for the feet and ankles.
“Six or seven years ago, the Hyperboot would have been impossible to develop,” Huether says, highlighting that the tech has evolved rapidly in the last couple of years so smaller and lighter wearable products are now a reality. “Tech-enabled footwear and potentially a parallel ecosystem with Nike is very exciting — we’re kind of like an innovation hub with them right now, developing tech-enabled products for athletes.”
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Nike’s Nurse says its approach to innovation has shifted from a focus on optimizing athlete mechanics through footwear to thinking more holistically about the moments before and after sports performance, rather than during the event itself. This has been exemplified by a string of launches in the last 12 months that incorporate heating, cooling, and compression into the design of its apparel and footwear, including the Hyperice collaboration, and its performance apparel line Aerofit.
In January 2026, Nike expanded into the emerging field of neurosensory design, which combines neuroscience and biomechanics with material engineering to create products that boost sensory feedback from the environment to the brain, with the launch of Nike Mind 001 and Mind 002. The shoes are being pitched as neuroscience-based footwear that activates sensory receptors in the feet via 22 independent nodes in the shoe to deepen athletes’ awareness and focus around performance — technology that Nurse says his team has been working on for the last decade.
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“We’re trying to shorten that brain-body feedback loop and tap into sensory intervention more, to think of movement and recovery through this more holistic approach,” Nurse says. “So definitely treat Mind 001 as chapter one of the whole body’s sensory intent for performance and recovery that we’re going to tap into via footwear and apparel — we have an entire canvas to play with,” he says.
The era of the ‘recovery score’
A big part of this move into neurosensory design for performance and recovery is inspired by the consumer-driven demand for products that cater to rhythmic health — the body’s circadian, hormonal, and performance-related cycles. Nurse says that where athletes have always understood how their circadian rhythm influences performance and recovery, the proliferation of wearable health trackings devices on the market has outpaced clear prescriptions, leaving an open challenge around how to translate data into actionable therapy via devices, footwear, and apparel.
“There’s clearly a desire to understand the impact all of this has on both physical and mental performance,” Nurse says. “Right now, we have all of this data about our nutrition and workouts, but we know very little about what’s going on inside us. Increasingly, we’re going to have more information at our fingertips, and that’s an exciting future.”
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Where wearable health trackings devices like Whoop, Oura, Fitbit, and Garmin have equipped consumers with abundant information on their activity and sleep that then delivers a daily “recovery score”, experts say the real opportunity lies in incorporating this data into actionable feedback loops within recovery tech devices and apparel itself. “Perhaps, the most exciting area is the convergence of physical and digital ecosystems,” Roberts says. He predicts that in the next year we’ll see “huge innovation” in how brands like Therabody connect their products with personalized solutions for consumers’ recovery, sleep, and pain management, via inputting biometric data from wearables, trackings training, incorporating manual inputs, and integrating AI models that create personalized recovery strategies based on the data these trackers collects on your body’s current state and goals. At Adidas, Makowski also says AI will “play a major role in managing a growing volume of performance data and inform [the brand’s] solution design and selection”, via activating compression and thermoregulation within apparel and footwear.
Sleep itself is a burgeoning category of the recovery movement. Sleep technology startup Eight Sleep, which makes sleep “pods” (ranging from $2,500 to over $4,000) that incorporate biometric trackings with heating and cooling technology and elevation, raised $50 million last month at a $1.5 billion valuation. “I think consumers now want more than data,” says Eight Sleep co-founder Alex Zatarain. “They don’t just want to be told every day if they slept well or not, or if they’re stressed or not. I really think there’s going to be a pushback toward data-only devices. AI is now giving us the ability to let people live their lives normally, but link up with devices that can give them that extra boost of recovery to mitigate the effects.” In May 2025, Hyperice and Whoop launched a collaboration that allows wearers of the health trackings band to link their Whoop app with the Hyperice app to log recovery sessions (like using the Normatec compression boots) and track how it affects their daily recovery score.
“It’s not just about building a great device anymore, it’s about building an intelligent system that understands the user and adapts to them,” Roberts says. “The physical product is one part of the equation, but the digital intelligence behind it is what transforms the experience.”
