The information published on this website is not intended to provide any health, wellness, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment of any kind. You should not take any action before consulting with a licensed healthcare professional.

I’VE WRITTEN BEFORE about the trend of professional-grade self-care tools being brought into your home by start-ups with techy vibes. Consider this piece another entry to that oeuvre, focusing on a company taking it to a whole new level.

Founded in 2009 by a doctor after his traumatic motorcycle accident, Therabody’s first product was the Theragun, a percussive massager. The photograph of the first generation of the tool, as shown on the company’s site, looks like it was made in someone’s garage. But over time, the offering evolved into something sleeker. If V1 looks like it belongs to the seedy, dimly lit real world of “The Matrix,” the current generation wouldn’t be out of place in an Apple ad, with its clean lines and streamlined black body, smooth to the touch.

Along with the evolution of their signature product, the company’s offerings have expanded. They seem to be looking to corner the high-end, post-workout market — a niche one, to be sure, but also one with deep pockets. Alongside the guns, Therabody now offers smaller personal massage tools, muscle stimulators, compression systems, and topicals and ingestibles.

I will pause here to say that not a single person who knows me well would consider me the core audience for these products. But I think I can speak with some authority about the space this company is occupying, because I live with someone who is very much their target customer. My husband is a workout machine. Alongside the gym he has assembled in our Brooklyn house, we have an entire drawer in our kitchen devoted to pre- and post-workout ingestibles — all manner of powders, pills, and tinctures meant to help optimize the work he puts in at the gym.

With all that working out, my husband is also perpetually and chronically sore. Our children buy him foam rollers for his birthday (“Daddy will love this!”), but his favorite tool seems to be a tennis ball, which he rolls under his feet and psoas constantly. While he does so, he makes a sound that makes me truly worry for his well-being. Is it good for a man of his age to torture his body the way he does? I’m not sure.

So — when the Therabody products arrived for a test drive, though I was curious to try them myself, I was more interested in testing them out on him. Here are the results of that testing, both his and mine.