In our quest to maintain great health for ourselves and our trainees, we invested in a Mild Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy chamber (MHBOT). I first saw one of these at a fitness convention in 2004 and wanted one there and then, but when I tried to finance it I was knocked back because I was a broke personal trainer in a new city. Fast forward to today and I am “livin la vida loca” with my HBOT.
Basically when you sit in a pressured environment with an increased (pure) oxygen supply, your body reorganizes itself on a cellular activity by up-regulating anti-inflammatory genes and down-regulating inflammatory genes. The pressure acts as a gas and because our body is made up of gasses on a microscopic scale, every cell must contract giving a "workout" response on a cellular level. As we know from the training cycle, the body runs on oxygen, so when we saturate the body with oxygen, we are ultimately giving our cells a nice mild workout with excellent hydration.
Some of the results from using MHBOT are amazing and seem to be full of it (B.S) - but who am I to disregard another persons tangible result if they are living proof of the process working? I will only ever share what I have seen with my eyes and the results I have felt are the following - which I CANNOT say are placebo or not - however I do not care, I just know they happened since using the chamber.
Better sleep - more restful. Ease of getting TO sleep is arguable, I think I go down heavier but there is a touch of increased mental activity before sleep kicks in but I have been getting up less during the night - again I am not sure if this is the chamber but I can say with confidence my sleep has been effected positively.
Faster recovery from training, this this is a text book response due to the anti inflammatory nature of the therapy but It is only subtle. I notice it because I have done 100's of thousands of hours of training so yes it works.
Old joint pains started lessening. I have knee issues from poor athletic form in my teens and early 20’s and have persistently tried to "fix" them non-surgically for the past 15 years. I can say with confidence that my knees have been getting progressively better. Deep squatting was a trip down knee burn lane but since using the chamber I have slowly gained confidence and can hit rock bottom again with half the burn I used to feel - and it is getting better as the weeks go by. Please note this was progressive. I did feel a marked improvement after my first session though.
Strength increase - weight lifting capacity went up. Plain and simple I got a 5% strength increase in a few weeks. Did I actually get "stronger" or was it because my body feels better so my trust in it to operate at high levels increased? I don’t know but it happened, and if you know me you will know I am very careful with weight lifting so a 5% increase is huge.
Mental clarity - this is a big one, I take in tremendous amounts of info every day from multiple sources and I often found myself stuttering and sometimes stumbling mid sentence like my words couldn’t catch up with my thought and since using the chamber this has changed big time. I feel mentally sharper is the best way to explain it.
Energy and fatigue cycles are more noticeable. Another strange one, they all spout about the energy high you get but no-one says anything about the fatigue. I find myself getting very tired when sleep time rolls around. Training felt different in the beginning too, I felt myself fatiguing faster because my output went up which was not expected. Felt like not being fit which was humbling and interesting at the same time.
Increased sense of well-being. I see this word combination ("well being") around a lot and often wonder what the heck it actually means to the point it seems like a BS euphemism, but I will use it here in this context because I cannot explain this effect any other way. I am sometimes a grumpy bugger who can be somewhat asocial, this is something I work on constantly so to feel "nicer" without having to remember to be was something that stuck out. I have noticed a marked improvement to my overall sense of feeling "good". This is not to say that feeling “bad” does not happen anymore - of course it does - but you really notice it when it does. To me this is a good thing.
So these are the biggest things that have happened to me with regular usage. I try to use it every day for about 70 minutes and find with each session the benefits I have just mentioned subtly amplify and last. I am not sure how long random session effects last - an interesting side-note is when people are asked about whether it "works" or not is they often do not initially notice the differences. It is the husband/wife/kids/etc that notice the changers more than the individual which I always find fascinating. If we do not notice changes but our loved ones do, what else are we missing?
If you want more science in Mild Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy check out the internet but be warned, most if not all of the medical case studies refer to HARD Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy which is completely different to mild. Most of the info on mild has been copied and pasted from a few major sites on HARD therapy so this obviously taints the info which is why I chose giving my personal opinion instead of a whole bunch of well conceived and placed words which are actually falsely misleading when they are using HARD therapies medical doctrine to promotes MILD’s benefits.
I wish I could point you in the right direction for medial research data on MILD’s benefits but I cannot. All I can say is that it works for me, thousands of professional athletes like Lebron James, professional cyclists sleep in them, home doctors have "cured" loved ones, tens maybe hundreds of thousands of regular folk swear by the benefits and I am becoming one of those.