A Secret Room, a $160K Longevity Chamber, Breathing Lamps, and Brain Wave States: Inside Elite Athletes’ Recovery Tricks

During the US Open, beneath Arthur Ashe Stadium, is a room so off-limits that it’s actually inside another room that is also very off-limits. In it, champions are recovering in a mind palace of cutting-edge technology. Officially, the only way to get in is with a player’s badge; unofficially, I got one. (Don’t ask.) This is after I spent the majority of the tournament tracking down the $159,500 Ammortal chamber, which claims to reset the nervous system and trigger hours of deep recovery in 25-minute sessions—less time than it takes to wait in line for a $23 Honey Deuce. The chamber combines five modalities, including red-light therapy; near-infrared therapy; pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF); and vibroacoustic therapy, designed alongside experts who’ve studied human frequency, to sync the vibration levels of the human body with meditative music.

The company behind the “human optimization” device couldn’t confirm if the device was at the tournament. You know, corporate secrecy, NDAs, and the whole “if we told you, we’d have to kill you” routine. No one was supposed to know it was at the Open. But Amanda Anisimova posted a photo of the chamber on her Instagram stories, and several anonymous sources playing in the tournament told me everyone is using it. That includes Novak Djokovic, who famously brought his own hyperbaric chamber to the US Open in 2019. (He’s also set to launch his own futuristic recovery pod, called Regenesis, with Qatar Airways.)

After some digging, I learned about a mysterious man named Marc Violone, who has been curating the player’s recovery room for years. He tells me the US Open established “the first dedicated recovery suite at a professional tennis tournament in 2019,” and continues to make it the “most advanced recovery space across the tour,” beyond the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) requirements for player recovery—an important move considering the importance of the Open to the player ranking system.

“At the US Open, you win a lot of points,” says Wim Fissette, who coaches women’s singles world number two, Iga Swiatek. “You have to be at your best—physically and mentally ready and improving. We still have daily speed and strength tests. So in six months we also want to be faster; we want to be stronger.”

The appearance of Ammortal at the Open marks a critical moment, where the current state of professional tennis looks like disclosed and undisclosed injuries, sleep deprivation, and higher mental and physical expectations. In a high-pressure,11-month season where every point matters, injuries and burnout are common. Men’s singles world number eight Alex de Minaur says he hit burnout after competing at Roland-Garros earlier this year.

“We live in a world fueled by wins, and you’re suffering throughout,” says de Minaur, describing the tennis player experience. “When you get the win, you keep going. And for a while, if you don’t get the win, eventually the suffering hits you after losing too many times, and that’s really what causes the mental burnout. The solution is to find a way to reset.”

Is it possible to sustain winning without injury and burnout, while building speed and strength? Now, top coaching teams are talking about regulating the nervous system as their biggest priority to get the edge. This is new.

“Managing energy is, in large part, about your nervous system, which is what we’re trying to manipulate all the time,” explains performance coach Jason Stacy, who works with US Open 2025 champion and women’s world number one, Aryna Sabalenka. Stacy compares the nervous system of an athlete to the operating system of a phone, explaining that how well it regulates will determine how all other apps perform.

While the world is hot for tennis, the winner’s circle has its eye on neuroscience. Swiatek’s physiotherapist, Maciej Ryszczuk, has been testing technology that calms the nervous system. On the men’s side, this year’s US Open champion and new world number one, Carlos Alcaraz, transformed into a teenage muscular powerhouse right before his ascent. His physio, Juanjo Moreno, isn’t just responsible for how ripped Aclaraz is—he’s also training his nervous system. The last American standing was men’s singles world number five, Taylor Fritz, who travels with an Eight Sleep cooling mattress cover. His physio, Wolfgang Oswald, says it helps bring his nervous system down at night, as high cortisol levels from overstimulation don’t allow for sleep or relaxation.

The Recovery Room

On a Friday night during a men’s match, I’m escorted through a guarded stadium entrance into the players’ spaces. The roar of the stadium crowd increases with each of the four security checkpoints. Past the player’s cafeteria and media hall is a blue carpet in a blue hallway lined with black-and-white portraits of the US Open champions. An abandoned microphone lays on the floor. “No pictures,” I’m reminded by my escort. As my borrowed player badge is scanned for the final time, I notice the player’s entrance to Arthur Ashe to my left. It’s open. A sign reads: “Pressure is a privilege.”

Directly opposite is the warm-up room, through which we find the mythical recovery room. It’s instantly calming (soundproof). Binaural frequency and essential oils fill the air. There are chairs set up with $2k Bang & Olufsen noise-canceling headphones at each station. The chamber is hidden behind privacy screens and fully looks like it belongs on a spaceship. Curtis Christopherson, chief growth officer at Ammortal, claims it downregulates the nervous system and kick-starts a four- to five-hour restorative state. The device is already a holy grail for professional athletes and biohackers; the Baltimore Ravens, Denver Broncos, LA Rams, LA Dodgers, and Arizona Diamondbacks have all worked with Ammortal, Christopherson shares. Last month, Matthew Stafford used it in lieu of practice when he was out with an aggravated disc, and has since returned stating he’s feeling “great.”

Players come in to calm their nervous systems and lower stress levels before and after matches, as well as to work on muscular tweaks, soreness, and fatigue. Marc Violone runs a tight ship, and the most he’ll disclose about player habits is that Ammortal is the most-booked modality in the recovery room. He has a running list of 50 unreleased recovery products on his phone, and some of the tech featured in the recovery room this year isn’t even on the market yet—notably, Ohm, a biofeedback breathing lamp that coaches your breathing until your nervous system is calm. For mental recovery and sleep, NuCalm is a standout restorative sleep system targeting different brain wave states to calm the brain, lower cortisol levels, and improve sleep quality. Then there’s the standard Normatec compression setup for every body part, Game Ready contrast therapy, a broad range of HyperIce technology, a PEMF setup to assist with acute muscle strains, and FlexBeam by Recharge Health, a portable medical-grade red-light and near-infrared device.

The Neuroscience of Greatness

For competing athletes, a regulated nervous system quickly shifts between a sympathetic fight-or-flight state of increased adrenaline, heart rate, and physical arousal for peak performance to a parasympathetic rest-and-digest state that controls stress and improves focus. Once competition is over, calming down to a parasympathetic state allows the body to recover and repair. The ability to quickly adapt between states during high-pressure situations in tennis is a key—as we know from Roger Federer, who won only 54% of points in the nearly 80% of matches he won. The best players barely win half the points they play, and the champions play the pressure points the best.

“A dysregulated nervous system is when the athlete gets stuck in the sympathetic overdrive state and can’t properly downregulate into the parasympathetic recovery state,” says Christopherson, who has worked with professional athletes for decades. A dysregulated nervous system looks like trouble sleeping, inability to recover fully, chronic stress, and increased risk of injury from adrenaline masking pain and fatigue. It’s also the root of burnout.

While all of this technology is new, regulating the nervous system has always been a skill related to the professional athlete’s mindset. Oswald says, “These athletes are here because they’re able to manage the nerves and the nervous system. Everyone gets nervous, and they’ve found strategies.” Breathing techniques, thought processes, positive affirmation, and having rituals are how champions do it on their own. Still, Oswald says younger players are losing self-awareness.

Biometric Data

The rise of neuroscience in professional sports comes with the use of performance optimization driven by data. Top players get their metrics, like heart rate variability, cortisol, and VO2 max, checked daily (some every morning and night), and their teams use the information to optimize training and recovery protocols. Ultimately, biometrics don’t predict performance and only highlight risk of injury or fatigue. Many players avoid looking at the data.

“At this level, they are really often in the red zone, and we can’t do too much,” says Ryszczuk, who, along with every coach interviewed for this piece, says restorative sleep is better than any device. Ryszczuk notes that many younger athletes would rather use advanced recovery tools when all they need to do is get a massage for 15 to 20 minutes and go to sleep.

“Players need to connect to their bodies,” adds Stacy, who coaches athletes to find moments throughout the day to practice internal regulation. For example, focusing on your exhale to activate the parasympathetic nervous system in social settings. Then it shows up on the court.

The pros also travel across all 24 global time zones each year, and for every hour of time zone change, it takes one full day to adjust and regulate. Some arrive at tournaments a week early to acclimate, but for lower-ranked players who can’t afford extra days in a hotel, access to a decked-out recovery room may level the playing field.

The Future of Tennis

Ultimately, the neuroscience of tennis reveals that the next generation of tennis players must return to the basics before depending on a $160k recovery chamber. Like in all sports, the physical demands of tennis are increasing and requiring stronger physicality. But relying on external data and recovery tools won’t produce champions who can keep up, says Akin Akman, a pro athlete favorite for mindset coaching. When in New York, players visit Akman to get a dose of old-school champion mindset conditioning that trains the nervous system in the process.

“All athletes, and not just tennis players, limit themselves in the same ways,” Akman says, explaining that it takes learning and shifting thought patterns about the body itself. Akman was trained by the late Hall of Fame legend Nick Bollettieri. After embodying the most winning philosophy in the game, Akman became a coach on Bollettieri’s team. Now, Akman has his own facility and a method for the next generation of champions, where nervous system regulation is taught through mindset mastery.

“The real frontier is mindset,” says Akman, who cautions that relying on technology outsources awareness. “We have to believe our bodies and nervous systems are finely tuned instruments that guide us if we learn to listen. Data is great, but relying on external tools to regulate our state takes away our certainty. Excellence lies in understanding and harnessing our own physiological responses.”

Akman coaches athletes to manage their fight-or-flight reactions as they undergo physical intensity, complete with high-pressure moments designed to simulate playing in a Grand Slam. Over time, the athlete’s brain adjusts its sensitivity to repeated stimuli, building resilience and allowing the nervous system to conserve energy and adapt faster. “The real evolution,” he says, “is learning by being, by doing, by feeling.”

The Open’s pioneering efforts in recovery, coupled with the increasing focus on the nervous system by top teams, are leading a quiet revolution toward a new understanding of athlete performance and longevity. The challenge for this era of champions lies in using the benefits of advanced technology without giving up on the pursuit of inner mastery. And that should go for all of us.