Our Verdict
The Recovapro Air boots have a long battery life and offer most of the features you can expect from compression boots while being slightly cheaper than the biggest names among its rivals. They’re still expensive, though, and don’t have a partner app to help you set up routines.
For
- Range of preset routines
- Wide pressure range
- Long battery life
- Quiet
Against
- No partner app
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I was sceptical at first about the benefits of compression boots, but they quickly won me over when I tested them during a marathon training cycle. The Recovapro Air are among the best compression boots I’ve tested and, in the UK at least, they offer slightly better value than the likes of Therabody and Normatec’s boots.
While they don’t have a partner app and lack the convenience of the wireless Therabody JetBoots, the Recovapro Air boots offer a lot of customisation and a wide pressure range, plus excellent battery life.
Recovapro Air: Price And Availability
The Recovapro Air are available now and have an RRP of £899, though at the time of writing they are reduced to £699.99 and have dropped to £650 in the past. I’ve never actually seen them for sale at their RRP. Recovapro ships to the US but there is no dollar price given, but on converting you can usually expect something around $1,000. Recovapro products usually come to Amazon US in time, so it may be worth waiting to see if they crop up there rather than buying direct.
Design
The Recovapro Air boots comprise four overlapping chambers and connect to a console that contains the battery and the motor that drives the pneumatic compression. Along with boots, Recovapro sells other attachments for the console, such as arms and a jacket.
While there is no partner app, you can easily adjust the settings for your session using the console. The pressure range runs from 30mmHg to 150mmHg and you can set the time from one to 99 minutes. There are six preset programmes on the console: warm up, recovery, flow, squeeze, release and wave. The nuances of some of these were lost on me and I mainly used the self-explanatory warm-up mode before runs and the recovery mode afterwards, but the flow mode is another useful one that is designed to prevent varicose veins.
The battery life on the console is 300 minutes, which is the longest I’ve found on the boots I’ve tested so far, and even when setting the pressure levels quite high the boots lasted four to five hours.
Another area where the Recovapro Air boots excel is portability, thanks to the gym bag they come with, which has sections to store each the boots and the console. This makes it straightforward to pack the boots down to a small size and carry them with you. It’s much better than the sack you get with the Therabody RecoveryAir JetBoots, while Normatec charges you $150/£195 for a rucksack to carry the Normatec 3 Legs boots.
User Experience
Having been spoiled by the wireless experience of the Therabody JetBoots, I did find it a bit of a faff to plug all the cables in each time when using the Recovapro Air boots, but once set up the console runs fairly quietly, though the smaller, sleeker console on the Normatec 3 Legs is quieter yet.
I didn’t find that I missed having a partner app to set up my sessions – the controls on the console worked easily enough. The console itself is large and heavy, but has a built-in handle to make it easy to move around.
The compression experience is just as good as any I’ve tested, and the Recovapro Air have a top pressure setting of 150mmHg that will satisfy anyone looking for a tight squeeze. I didn’t use that setting regularly because it was a little uncomfortable in the level of pressure applied, but you can adjust the pressure during a session quickly if you are finding it too intense. Or indeed not intense enough.
Nailing down the effects of compression boots is tricky, especially as I used them in concert with other recovery methods, such as yoga and a massage gun, but I felt like the boots helped me bounce back from tough runs faster. On one notable occasion I pulled the boots on feeling ragged after a 22-mile run, and took them off feeling so spry I immediately did some DIY. That said, it may just have been the benefit of 40 minutes lying on the sofa…
Are The Recovapro Air Worth It?
The Therabody RecoveryAir JetBoots are more convenient and I prefer them to the Recovapro Air boots. However, the latter are cheaper and more customisable, and the value of the excellent carry/storage case shouldn’t be underestimated, because compression boots are bulky things to have in your house.
At the full RRP of £899 I’d get the Normatec 3 Legs instead, since the design is better and they have a slick partner app that works well in helping you to set up your sessions. If you spy the Recovapro Air boots for around £650, however, they are a good-value option that offer the same key benefits as the most expensive boots.
