The Blue Board

"We built a silly device, took it over to the recovery room and, lo and behold, it worked beyond our wildest imaginations," Heller explained. "Whereas it was taking them hours to re-warm patients coming into the recovery room, we were doing it in eight, nine minutes."

But the glove's effects on athletic performance didn't become apparent until the researchers began using the glove to cool a member of the lab –the confessed "gym rat" and frequent coauthor Vinh Cao –between sets of pull-ups. The glove seemed to nearly erase his muscle fatigue; after multiple rounds, cooling allowed him to do just as many pull-ups as he did the first time around. So the researchers started cooling him after every other set of pull-ups.

"Then in the next six weeks he went from doing 180 pull-ups total to over 620," said Heller. "That was a rate of physical performance improvement that was just unprecedented."

The researchers applied the cooling method to other types of exercise –bench press, running, cycling. In every case, rates of gain in recovery were dramatic, without any evidence of the body being damaged by overwork –hence the "better than steroids" claim. Versions of the glove have since been adopted by the Stanford football and track and field teams, as well as other college athletics programs, the San Francisco 49ers, the Oakland Raiders and Manchester United soccer club.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html