Recover and Heal Like an NFL Player
© Copyright 2026 by Dr David Meredith, DAc
I have three graduate degrees and, for the life of me, I still can’t figure out the rules of American football. For years (when they were, ahem, winning) I had an acupuncture client who was a Baltimore Raven, and I think he liked that I didn’t know anything about his sport other than what it did to his body, and how to fix it. It meant I wasn’t peppering him with questions, Monday morning quarterbacking, fishing for gossip, or pestering him for tickets. Although once (wanting him to get more recovery time in), when I asked when the season would be over, he did look at me strangely, saying, “Well, we usually hope to get to the Super Bowl.”
I had forgotten there was a Super Bowl.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard an alarming amount of yelling at a restaurant. It turned out there was an NFL game on in the bar. The Ravens were fighting for their last chance at the playoffs. I went home thinking that this was something my clients would be talking about all week.
It wasn’t. The Ravens lost. The season ended. That coach guy got fired.
So you may not want to hear about our local team right now… but please bear with me because this is where my graduate degrees do come in handy.
Late in the year—probably too late to make a difference to the sad outcome—the Ravens did something that is worth paying attention to, because it reveals how seriously elite organizations take recovery when everything is on the line. The team invested in a wellness machine that looks like it belongs in a big-budget science fiction movie and costs as much as a house.
As the season wound down, the Baltimore Banner ran a story on it (by Jonas Shaffer), probably leaving disgruntled fans across the land wondering how things might have gone if they’d installed it sooner, because recovery is one of the few places where timing and repetition really do matter. The benefits compound to help prevent the situation from getting worse, support repair of current problems, and promote future gains. Oh, to have had it in time for training!
The machine (and why people talk about it like it’s from the future)
The device is called the Ammortal Chamber, and its hefty price tag is about $160,000. What makes it so coveted, other than that it looks like it would be at home in Avengers HQ, is that it isn’t just one kind of powerful therapy. It’s a stack of them—multiple recovery inputs bundled into a single session. Ammortal describes the core therapies as:
Full-body Red + Near Infrared light (photobiomodulation)
Full-body multi-wave PEMF / PEF (electromagnetic pulsing)
Full-body vibroacoustics (sound + vibration “journeys”)
Voice-guided breathwork, intention-setting, and relaxation
Molecular hydrogen via nasal cannula
In plain English: it’s trying to create a repeatable experience that helps the body shift out of “fight/flight + stress + tension + soreness + injury + pain” and into a more repair-oriented state, using several powerful performance/recovery modalities at once.
That’s the elite part. The surprising part (if you don’t read my newsletter emails) is this: you, too, can get these benefits… without being a sports millionaire.
You don’t need access to the magic pod to get most of its benefits
What makes the Ammortal Chamber so compelling is convenience… if you conveniently happen to have access to the Ravens’ training facilities. The machine bundles several powerful and increasingly popular recovery modalities into one repeatable session.
But the underlying ingredients aren’t proprietary, and their benefits aren’t limited to professional athletes. Most of the core pillars in that “elite recovery stack” are already available to you at Very Well (Baltimore’s most awesome wellness center!), delivered as stand-alone services that can be combined based on individual goals.
Here’s a clear translation from “what the Ravens’ magic pod stacks” to “what people can do at Very Well,” with a fuller picture of the benefits each modality is typically used for.
Red / Near-Infrared light = Full-Body Red Light Therapy at Very Well
Red light therapy is widely used in performance and wellness settings because it’s noninvasive, comfortable, and easy to build into a busy schedule. People often choose Red Light Therapy for both “body” recovery and “life” recovery—supporting the nervous system after stress as well as the tissues after physical strain.
It’s commonly used to support:
Post-workout recovery and soreness/stiffness support (especially with consistent use)
Stress recovery and downshifting—many people report feeling calmer or less “wired” after sessions, and research suggests RLT can influence well-being and mood measures.
Skin support, healing, and visible rejuvenation, including improvements in aspects of skin texture and appearance—often including looking younger and more radiant.
Cellular renewal: RLT is widely described in the scientific literature as influencing cellular energy processes and tissue responses, which is one reason it’s studied across both skin and recovery domains.
Brain support: reviews suggest RLT may help anxiety and depressive symptoms and may have potential effects on brain function/cognition, though results can vary.
Red light tends to work best as a therapy over time—for a steady support of recovery, resilience, skin, optimized aging, and stress load—rather than a one-time “fix,” but many people do see results after the first session.
PEMF / electromagnetic pulsing = PEMF at Very Well
PEMF (Pulsed Electromagnetic Field) therapy results are often experienced as subtle in the moment, then more noticeable over time, especially when it becomes a consistent part of a wellness or recovery routine. Many people use PEMF as a “foundation modality” because it’s powerful and it pairs well with almost every other health intervention.
It’s commonly used to support:
Tissue repair signaling and recovery support, particularly in musculoskeletal contexts. PEMF has a long clinical history in areas like bone healing and is actively reviewed for broader roles in tissue repair and regeneration (bone, skin, muscle, nerve).
Stress recovery and nervous system settling, especially for people who feel stuck in a high-output, low-recovery loop.
Pain and inflammation support, which is one reason PEMF appears in many rehab and performance environments.
Cellular resilience: PEMF is discussed in research as influencing cellular processes involved in repair (cell signaling, inflammation pathways, etc.).
All of these benefits make PEMF an intriguing choice for helping to achieve many health goals, including injury repair, increased energy, reversing damage from stress, anti-aging and longevity, increasing muscle and bone density, and more. Red Light Therapy may be more popular at the moment, but if I had to choose one therapeutic technology to use for the majority of health conditions I encounter, it would be PEMF.
Vibroacoustics + guided downshifting = Modern Sound Bath (and Deep Dive) at Very Well
Stacked recovery tools often include sound, vibration, and guided relaxation because downshifting the nervous system is a real pillar of recovery. Very Well’s Modern Sound Bath is designed to create reliable decompression, especially for people whose bodies feel “braced” from stress. It also offers sometimes astonishing results for focus, uplift, and motivation, depending on the program selected.
People commonly use it to support:
Stress decompression and a felt sense of reset and peace
Sleep onset support for people who have trouble turning their brain off
Muscle relaxation when tension is driven by stress physiology
Mood steadiness and emotional regulation as a recurring practice
Focus and creative clarity, especially with longer sessions like the Deep Dive, where the system has time to truly settle
The Modern Sound Bath at Very Well can quickly generate noticeable—sometimes dramatic—shifts in mood and brainwave state, as ongoing mind training or just as a quick “vacation” from your day. The “Deep Dive” sessions can take that even further, giving you the time, space, and tools to help you integrate the session and make real progress on your goals.
Heat therapy = Infrared Sauna + Salt Room at Very Well
Most elite training facilities—including the Ravens’—invest in heat because it reliably supports recovery: warmth helps people relax muscles, reduce stiffness, improve circulation, and downshift stress. That’s the basic “sauna advantage,” and it’s clear why athletes lean on it week after week.
Very Well offers that same foundational heat benefit but with an extra layer most pro facilities don’t have: a salt microclimate.
Put them together and you get a broader reset than heat alone.
Heat / sauna layer:
Muscle relaxation and reduced stiffness
Stress relief and nervous system downshifting
Sleep support for those who respond well to heat later in the day
Circulation support and that “looser body” feeling afterward
Body “detox” support
Salt microclimate layer:
Respiratory comfort and support: many people report easier breathing or a sense of clearer airways; salt therapy is often described as potentially supporting mucus thinning/clearance and symptom relief in some chronic respiratory contexts.
Sinus/upper-airway support: some research and reviews discuss improvements in symptoms/functional measures in conditions involving nasal/sinus congestion.
Skin support: salt therapy is sometimes used as a supportive practice for certain skin complaints.
Add in Very Well’s customizable light therapy and sound environment, and you’ve got all the physical support an elite athlete can expect… plus you come away from a 30-minute session feeling like you just spent a week at the beach.
What the magic pod can’t do = Acupuncture, Massage Therapy, Advanced Cupping at Very Well
A high-tech chamber can stack a bundle of interventions, but it can’t tailor a plan to an individual pattern, adapt in real time, or address the full context of a person’s life and body. That’s where hands-on care becomes a key advantage—especially when symptoms are specific, layered, or persistent, or when there are important life goals to take into account.
At Very Well:
Acupuncture supports whole-system regulation—commonly used for stress resilience, pain support, sleep support, and helping the body re-regulate under pressure.
Massage therapy supports muscular recovery, mobility, and tissue-level tension patterns—especially when discomfort is driven by overuse, posture, or stress holding.
Advanced cupping supports stubborn tightness and restriction patterns by improving local circulation and helping tissues “unstick,” often translating into improved range of motion and less persistent discomfort.
The hydrogen piece
The Ravens’ Ammortal Chamber includes molecular hydrogen as one ingredient in its stack, an intriguing newer layer with a growing research base. At Very Well, the emphasis stays on the pillars that have been demonstrated over the years to most reliably restore capacity: red light wavelengths, PEMF, heat, vibroacoustics, and deep downshifting—and then skilled hands when someone needs more personalized care. When those fundamentals are repeated, recovery stops being crisis management and becomes momentum: more energy, more clarity, more room for joy, and more progress toward meaningful goals.
Which brings us to the part I care about more than gadgets and even the hometown team…
Why “elite sports recovery” matters even if you’re not athletic
If you’re not an athlete, “sports recovery” can sound like a niche perk for people who schedule their lives around leg day.
But the real reason elite teams obsess over recovery isn’t sport-specific. It’s because bodies have a predictable response to load. When stress piles up faster than recovery can accumulate, something will give.
For athletes, it’s obvious and public: a tweak becomes a missed practice, soreness turns into a compensation pattern, a small injury becomes a much longer storyline. Their symptoms show up as reduced performance—speed, strength, stability, focus—and there’s an entire staff whose job is to keep those signals from turning into a breakdown.
For everyone else, the same biology shows up in less televised ways. Instead of “missed practice,” it’s canceled plans. Instead of “limited reps,” it’s waking up already tired. Instead of “playing through a tweak,” it’s living with a rotating cast of symptoms: tight neck and shoulders, low-back flare-ups, headaches, sleep that isn’t restorative, brain fog, digestive turbulence, anxiety, low mood, or that constant sense that the body is quietly protesting. So many people tell me resignedly, when describing aches in multiple joints, “Oh, it’s just a part of aging.” No. No, it isn’t, not necessarily.
In sports, those signals get treated like data: something is loading faster than it’s recovering—adjust the plan! In normal life, people often treat the same signals like background noise. They’ll drink more coffee, push through, deal with it later. Until “later” arrives as a bigger problem.
Very Well exists to help people interrupt the pattern before it becomes their accepted baseline. The earlier we catch it, the better.
So if “recover like an athlete” isn’t your goal, here are the relevant equivalents:
Recover like a creator: focus and protect the bandwidth for writing, building, making art, learning, or whatever you’re trying to bring into the world.
Recover like a leader / caregiver / parent: protect patience, steadiness, confidence, energy level, and the ability to be present instead of depleted.
Recover like a person with a mission: reduce the drag of stress and physical discomfort so the best parts of you aren’t trapped behind constant “maintenance mode.”
Recover like a retiree: reduce muscle and bone loss, slow cognitive decline, keep strong and active, stay inspired, live longer in greater health.
Elite recovery isn’t about becoming athletic if you don’t want to. It’s about becoming less inhibited and more available to your life, your people, your work, your joy. Better quality of life. More able to see and feel possibilities for living more fully.
OK, so you recover enough to get ahead of the game. Then what?
People come to Very Well because they want to get their life back. In the moment, distracted by discomfort, this usually seems to mean one thing to them: being symptom-free. No pain. No uncomfortable flare-ups. No fatigue. No stress reactions. No anxiety or depression. Just smooth sailing… for once.
With consistent care, that can happen! You’re (probably) not a pro football player about to get tackled yet again by a hundred giant guys, so once things are back on track for you, it will be easier to keep things more comfortable for a while. (There will be fluctuations. Life will show up as unexpected stressors and urgencies. But these will be easier to recover from.)
And once someone has built enough recovery into their routine—the question shifts from “How do I get through my week?” to “What do I want to do with my week?”
That’s where LIFE (bold! all caps!) shows up… the possibility, not just the process… going beyond just feeling good to really exploring how you want to create your experience and take things to the next level.
Relationships. Being present instead of depleted. Having the patience to listen. The peace of mind to be present. The energy to play. The steadiness to build solid foundations.
Passion projects. The book. The art. The side business. The volunteer experience. The stuff that never fits into a calendar when someone is constantly managing symptoms. Recovery creates the bandwidth where those projects can finally breathe.
Mastery. Getting better at something—hobby, music, leadership, craft, sport, parenting, anything that matters to you. Mastery requires attention and repetition, and these require a body and nervous system that can recover from daily stresses enough to prioritize and focus.
Career and ambition. The reward of a high-powered career isn’t just money. It’s influence, impact, momentum, the satisfaction of building something real. But none of that is sustainable if stress becomes chronic wear-and-tear. Recovery turns “hustle” into something more intelligent, output that doesn’t quietly destroy the person producing it.
Joy. Not as a luxury, but as a signal of health and living fully. The ability to feel enthusiasm again. To look forward to things. To have fun without paying for it afterward. To let your spirit soar. To share these feelings with the people around you, creating a bubble of positivity and possibility and freedom in a chaotic world.
Contribution. The world needs people who are resourced. People who have enough internal stability to see what needs fixing around them. To care. To be helpful, generous, creative, kind, and brave. When someone isn’t constantly managing their own depletion, the world’s needs become clearer. They see where they fit in to the big picture, and they have more to share and give. This is possible for regular, everyday people, not just millionaires or an elite class.
I started Very Well expressly to get people to this level of living, which I alternately call “living fully,” “optimal living,” or more succinctly, just “possibility.” The point where your personal recovery and wellness takes on its own momentum, becomes the force behind shaping your life the way you want it, and positively affects the people and world around you. That’s my personal vision and our vision as a company.
We’re getting used to living in times where snake oil, grifting, and misinformation is replacing wisdom, experience, and research. So if it feels like a stretch to hope that lying under red LEDs for a few minutes or exposing your body to electromagnetism while you take a catnap is going to be life-changing… that’s understandable.
All I can say is that the evidence supports it, I see it happen every day, and I’ve felt it happen in myself. The most important thing is to choose the treatments that will address your symptoms, build them into your schedule (more frequently at first to build momentum, spaced out more as you start to see results), and use them consistently. For real and lasting change, your level of intervention has to both balance and outpace the inertia of accumulating stressors.
Every one of our services is holistic—of broad-spectrum benefit on multiple levels at the same time—calming, and enjoyable. People love coming to Very Well as a refuge from their day, and they leave feeling better, with a healthy glow and peaceful energy, and ready to take on life.
How to build your own “stack” of wellness services at Very Well
The Ravens’ new chamber is expensive because it bundles power with convenience: one place, one session, multiple effective inputs.
At Very Well, you can build that same layered effect by combining services intentionally, and you can do it in a way that fits your specific goals and preferences.
Two simple stacks to start with:
Recovery Reset (calm + restore)
PEMF + Modern Sound Bath + Infrared Sauna + Salt Room
(For mood, stress load, sleep disruption, nervous system tension, and “I need my body to unclench.”)
Performance + Recovery (recharge + bounce-back + pain-management + resilience)
PEMF + Full-Body Red Light Therapy
(For cellular recharge, injury healing, inflammation reducing, nerve calming, tissue repair, optimized aging.)
Making it accessible: memberships + packages
The real barrier to “recovering like an athlete” or “living your best life” is rarely the awareness that something needs to change. That much is usually quite clear, but it gets lost in the shuffle of inertia, daily obligations, and not knowing where to start.
Elite athletes don’t stumble into recovery when things hurt. They build it into the week, the way you build brushing your teeth into the day. Not because they’re virtuous, but because it works. Small course-corrections, done early and often, keep small problems from becoming career-ending disasters.
That’s why we offer memberships and packages at Very Well… not only as “deals” (although they are great money-savers), but as structures that make momentum realistic, consistent, and attainable over time.
If someone wants the simplest on-ramp, we offer FREE consultations—a 30-minute initial consultation, plus free 15-minute follow-ups. They’re optional, but they’re incredibly helpful for turning “I should do something” into “here’s my plan.”
And for people who already know they do best with structure (most of us do), we have two ways to make consistency easier:
Memberships — for ongoing rhythm and flexibility
THE CORE ($99/month) builds a steady baseline: the $99 becomes account credit you can use toward anything, and you also get 20% off therapeutic technology sessions (PEMF, Red Light, Modern Sound Bath, Infrared Sauna + Salt Room). The credit rolls over until you use it, so it’s forgiving if life gets busy.
THE ENHANCED ($199/month) adds the human element: one 60-minute hands-on session each month (Acupuncture, Massage, or Advanced cupping), plus $99 credit and the same 20% technology discount.
THE UNLIMITED ($999/month) is the full ecosystem: unlimited therapeutic technologies plus two hands-on sessions each month.
Packages — for people who want a focused “burst of momentum,” or who love to stock up on their favorites
Our Health FOUNDATION Packages are curated stacks aimed at specific goals, and they’re all $649 (with retail values listed at $840–$900). Some of these are: “RELIEF AND RESILIENCE: Support for Chronic Pain”; “PEAK PERFORMANCE: Strength, Stamina, Recovery, Drive”; and “EVERGREEN: Optimized Aging and Longevity.” And there’s also “THRIVE: Foundational Wellness for Body, Mind, and Spirit,” which is a sampler of every service we offer if you’d like to try it all.
And the Session Series package options let people multiply the treatments they already know work for them—Massage Therapy sessions, PEMF, Red Light, Infrared Sauna + Salt Room, Modern Sound Bath tiers—so the plan is simple: show up, repeat, benefit.
The takeaway (and the end of my brief career in football commentary)
The Ravens can buy a $160,000 recovery pod for maximum healing power and convenience. Very Well has a much better offer for you.
You need a repeatable, reliable way to stay resourced—to get better and stay well—so life opens up more: for relationships, for ambition, for mastery, for joy, for meaningful work, for the projects that make a life feel like you were put here on earth to live it.
That’s what we’re doing here at our serene suite in Cross Keys. We’re not selling “wellness vibes.” We’re helping you build capacity, so you can recover faster, course-correct sooner, and keep moving toward the bigger life you actually care about.
And if you’re not sure where to start, that’s what the free consultation is for: a clear plan, a first step, designing a rhythm you can maintain over time.
(As for the rules of football: I remain blissfully unqualified. But bodies? Bodies make sense. They signal. They adapt. They are wise. And given the right interventions on a regular basis, they heal, get stronger, get more energetic, offer us more possibilities for living.)
Until next time, friends…
—Dr David Meredith, DAc, LAc, Dipl Ac