For athletes, recovery doesn’t always happen at home.
Sometimes it happens beside the track.
Sometimes it happens between competition rounds.
Sometimes it happens in a hotel room hundreds of kilometres from home.
And sometimes it happens sitting in the back of the FAST Buzz.
For FAST sprinter Daniel Nwaobi, training and competition increasingly mean being on the move. And that makes the practical side of recovery important.
Daniel has partnered with Australian recovery brand BodyICE, bringing together one of FAST’s leading young sprinters with a product designed around a simple idea: recovery tools need to work wherever athletes actually are.
The first campaign shoot took us to Wollongong — Daniel in FAST colours, the new FAST Buzz nearby and a BodyICE multipurpose recovery pack providing a splash of blue amongst all that black and red.
It also provided a pretty good picture of modern athlete life.
Training Doesn’t Always Finish at the Track
A sprint session may occupy only part of an athlete’s day.
There is travelling to training, warming up, completing the session, cooling down, getting home, eating, sleeping and preparing to do it all again.
Competition can add another layer: travel, multiple races, unfamiliar environments and long periods spent away from an athlete’s normal routine.
For FAST athletes competing interstate — and increasingly internationally — those realities become part of performance.
That is one reason we have been interested in making recovery practical, rather than simply accumulating more recovery gadgets.
The BodyICE multipurpose pack Daniel is wearing in these photographs is designed to provide targeted hot or cold compression around several areas particularly relevant to running athletes, including the hamstrings, thighs, hips and knees. The hydrogel remains flexible when frozen and the adjustable straps allow the pack to remain secured around the body rather than requiring an athlete to sit holding an ice pack in position.
For an athlete, that last part is more useful than it might sound.
Recovery That Travels
A good recovery tool isn’t particularly helpful if it permanently lives in a cupboard.
Athletes need solutions that can come to training, travel in the car, go to competitions and fit into the realities of their lives.
BodyICE describes its recovery products as reusable, portable and designed for hot or cold use. Its gel sleeves and multipurpose products are intended to provide compression while remaining flexible, including when frozen.
That portability fits naturally with what the FAST Buzz was built to do.
Our Volkswagen ID. Buzz isn’t simply FAST branding on wheels. It gives our coaching team the capacity to move equipment between venues, support clinics and training sessions, and increasingly take parts of the FAST Performance environment with us.
Blocks. Hurdles. Training equipment.
And now, recovery equipment.
The photographs from Wollongong bring those ideas together: athlete, equipment and recovery, on the move.
Where Does Cold Fit?
Recovery is bigger than an ice pack.
At FAST we don’t want athletes believing that any single product replaces the fundamentals.
Sleep matters. Nutrition matters. Hydration matters. Appropriate training load matters. Good rehabilitation and clinical advice when an athlete is injured matter.
Cold and compression can have a place within that wider toolkit.
BodyICE’s compression gel products can be used cold or warm, are designed to stay flexible when frozen, and provide 360-degree compression. The company recommends approximately 20 minutes of application for its gel sleeves.
The important word for us is tool.
We want athletes to understand why they are doing something rather than automatically reaching for recovery products after every session.
Sometimes the right thing after training is simply to eat, hydrate and sleep.
Sometimes an athlete is managing soreness, a knock or an injury under guidance and targeted cold or heat may form part of that plan.
Context matters.
Particularly Relevant to Sprinters
There is another reason Daniel is a natural athlete for this partnership.
Sprint performance places substantial demands on the lower body.
Daniel’s FAST Performance program incorporates acceleration, maximum velocity, speed endurance and strength and conditioning. Managing those demands is part of developing an athlete who can consistently express speed rather than merely survive training.
And the areas that runners occasionally need to manage are hardly surprising: hamstrings, quadriceps, knees, calves, ankles and hips.
BodyICE produces different products and sizes intended for many of those areas. Its larger gel sleeves, for example, are designed for the thigh and hamstring region, while medium and smaller versions target areas including knees, calves, shins, ankles and elbows.
That makes the wider range potentially relevant beyond Daniel.
What This Could Mean for FAST Athletes
This is where the partnership becomes particularly interesting for us.
Daniel may be the athlete in the photographs, but the use case extends across FAST.
We have sprinters moving between training and competition.
We have jumpers and hurdlers managing the demands of their events.
We have FAST for Sport athletes balancing speed training with football, hockey and other sporting commitments.
We have Masters athletes.
And we have athletes travelling interstate for National Championships and other major competitions.
Our interest in partnerships is strongest when there is a genuine connection between a product and the lives of our athletes.
Recovery that can travel with the team is one of those connections.
We will explore what that can mean for FAST members as the relationship develops.
An Australian Performance Story
There is another connection we like.
BodyICE is Australian owned and designed, and was founded in 2006 by Olympic aerial skiing champion Lydia Lassila following her own experience with a serious knee injury. The original idea was to develop reusable hot/cold recovery products that were secure, portable and less messy than conventional ice packs.
Twenty years later, one of our young Australian sprinters is helping tell the next part of that story.
For Daniel, there are bigger performances still being chased.
For FAST, there are more athletes, competitions and kilometres ahead.
And for the Buzz?
Apparently carrying hurdles and starting blocks wasn’t enough.
It now has recovery duties too.
Congratulations to Daniel and BodyICE on the partnership.
Performance travels. Recovery should too.
FAST Performance | Centre of Running Excellence
Running Excellence grows. 🖤❤️
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