'Jack Nowell is my greatest success, he got his medals'

It was typical tongue-in-cheek Alex Sanderson. Invited last month by RugbyPass to pump the tyres of Bevan Rodd after the loosehead was given the player of the match award versus Harlequins in Gallagher Premiership round one, the Sale director of rugby quipped: “He sleeps in a tent in his house – I told you he is a bit strange… It’s so wet up north you have to sleep in a tent in your house!”

The chuckling over, Sanderson admitted: “I have no idea what it is about.” So then, what is the reason for an England international prop forward sleeping in a hyperbaric tent?

Performance and recovery consultant Samuel Newsham is the practitioner in the know, as 10X Performance Recovery, the Lytham St Annes-based company, provide Rodd and fellow Sharks Raffi Quirke and Ross Harrison the equipment that the Sale boss referenced.

Google search hyperbaric oxygen treatments and you will come across the likes of LeBron James, the USA basketball legend, making use of the science way back. It was this type of research that resulted in Anthony Watson picking up the phone to Newsham in early 2017 and becoming an early UK adaptor.

A hamstring injury had limited his involvement with England during that year’s Six Nations, but not long after he was a starter in all three Test matches for the British and Irish Lions tour in New Zealand. Mission complete. “Anthony was a very clever boy, had done his own research to have a look what the Americans were doing,” enthused Newsham to RugbyPass.

“LeBron James had just released a video in 2016 of him using his hyperbaric chamber and (Floyd) Mayweather Junior was using his, and we were the only outfit in the UK at the time. He just said, ‘How can we do it?’ We arranged something, got him back quicker than we should have which was amazing.”

To cut a long scientific story short, the mechanics of hyperbaric is spending time in a sealed pressurised environment to reduce inflammation and speed up the rate of the oxygen molecule for recovery. Newsham swears by it. So too do multiple players in American football’s NFL, where the treatment is now prevalent across that sport’s league.

However, rugby has generally remained sceptical despite some notable individual successes, leaving it up to the players to use as an additional treatment in their own time rather than something more centrally prescribed throughout the game.

“We are trying to get in front of the people who make the decisions and it’s just met with either deaf ears or dismissal, which is a shame because it works,” shrugged Newsham. “I was the first to bring over home-use hyperbaric chambers to the UK and my first client was Anthony Watson. He was the first big name I started working with. From there, Kyle Sinckler got involved, Mike Brown and a few others as well. They started coming to me privately for hyperbaric treatment to speed up their recovery.

“Take Jack Nowell, my greatest success, for example. In 2020, he had two finals, had a fractured toe and was told by everyone involved he wouldn’t make the final two games. I got a phone call from him saying, ‘Sam, what can you do?’ I arranged for him to have hyperbaric treatment combined with the infared and he got back for the last two games and got his medals which was a great success story.”

Tell us more. “Jack is one of the most modest athletes I have ever met, such a lovely guy. He got my number off Anthony at the time and said, ‘Listen, this is what I am dealing with, this is the injury, what can you do?’ My first response was, ‘Do as you’re told because a lot of boys don’t’.

“We put the initial protocol together for him and we got him back for his first medal game. He absolutely loved it. ‘Yes, it’s working’. Physio did a really good job as well. And then he got injured again in that game (versus Racing 92), so they were like you’re not going to make the next one (versus Wasps).

“So we put him on a different protocol that was a bit more intense and got him back again. At the end of it, I was getting photos of his feet in stitches and all sorts. It was good fun but he was over the moon. He was like, ‘I’m back!’ He was driven and wanted to do it for the lads and for himself… he put the effort in and it worked.”

This fast-tracked recovery is something Nowell has spoken about, telling The Good, The Bad & The Rugby: “I did a grade three turf toe. The ligaments that pretty much attach your toe to your foot, I managed to rupture them all in the last 10 minutes against Toulouse (in the European semi-final).

“I was just literally on my toe about to push off and as I pushed off someone tackled me as well. I thought I snapped the bottom of my boot so I was on the floor and I checked my boot and it was fine, but it was actually the ligaments in my foot which snapped.

“It was pretty much a floppy toe… but it was a Heineken Cup final, a Premiership final, there was no way I was going to miss these games, so that’s a prime example of hyperbaric. I would have never lived with myself watching the boys winning and not being part of that, so I was very happy I was trusted and very happy that I was able to play.”

Sale prop Rodd is another success. “He had a career-ender ACL with a few additional things done as well and it was 12 months minimum,” recalled Newsham. “We got him back in four and a half. He was using his system three times a day, an hour and a half each session.

“He was getting the optimum, the maximum amount of the system that he could. He managed something like 2,000 hours in four and a half months, he really did hit it. But again, that is the point, it’s the more you use it… The effect only lasts four to six hours. Four to six hours after getting out of the chamber your body goes back to normal process, so he was in his morning, noon and night to hit his recovery protocols to get back.”

Having recently split his hamstring, a grade three C injury, Rodd is fully invested in the hyperbaric process once more to provide an added edge to get him back on the field next month, but his trust in the science isn’t mirrored across the game.