What You’ll Learn
- How red light therapy helps runners and cyclists recover faster by reducing muscle soreness and joint inflammation.
- Why professional athletes are using red light therapy to stay healthy, injury-free, and consistently improve performance.
- How easy it is to add red light therapy to your at-home recovery routine for long-term endurance and strength gains.
As an endurance athlete, you’re already aware that recovery is key to continued high-level performance. In the last few years, many endurance athletes have incorporated red light therapy into their recovery programs and, by all accounts, it’s doing a great job of helping them recover from sore muscles, inflamed joints, and microscopic cellular damage from repeated stress.
Whether you’re a professional or someone who just loves to push their body to its absolute limit, recent scientific breakthroughs are helping runners and cyclists who want to train hard, recover faster, and avoid injuries.
Let’s take a look at how red light therapy helps get that done.
Recovery is the key to greater endurance for athletes
When you train your body for endurance sports, you’re essentially breaking down the body for it to be able to rebuild stronger. Like the Six Million Dollar Man, but slightly less dramatic.
The point is that every time you lace up for a big run or jump in the saddle for an epic ride, your muscles endure thousands of contractions, your joints absorb repetitive impact, and your cardiovascular system runs near its limit. All of this is the foundation of endurance sports, where the real gains come from pushing yourself to the limits and then taking time to recover.
To get more endurance and longer distances at faster paces, you need to recover. Dealing with soft tissue inflammation, joint stiffness, and overuse injuries like shin splints, tendinitis, and stress fractures isn’t any fun. And it’s not supposed to be. It’s how your body tells you that you haven’t healed enough to match the demands you’re placing on your system.
If your goal is to be faster over longer distances, recovery routines aren’t optional. There are a lot of different tools available these days to help athletes of all levels to enhance their recover routines. You’ll find athletes using massage guns to loosen muscles, ice baths to fight inflammation, and compression gear to stimulate circulation.
Adding red light therapy into that mix is helping a lot of endurance athletes to reduce muscle soreness, improve joint mobility, and help their bodies repair at the cellular level.
Red light therapy works by delivering specific wavelengths of red and near-infrared light directly to skin and muscle tissue. This light stimulates mitochondria, which are the powerhouse of your cells, to produce more ATP, the energy your body uses for cellular repair and regeneration. The result is faster muscle recovery, reduced inflammation, and better tissue resilience after heavy training loads.
That means that you’re not just feeling better, but bouncing back quicker so you can maintain consistent, injury-free training.
Red light therapy for runners: supporting joints, muscles, and distance
The feeling of going for a long-distance run is indescribable. As such, I won’t try to describe it here. But you know just how wonderful it can feel. And also how challenging it can be.
For you, it’s not just about the distance, but also the repetition. You’re putting stress on the same muscle groups and joints over and over, often for hours at a time, and that stress adds up. You can plan all you want, but you’re not always able to fully protect yourself against tight calves, inflamed knees, and sore hips after long runs or hill sessions.
Many runners are turning to red light therapy to ease that burden. When you use it consistently as part of a muscle recovery routine, red light therapy sessions can go a long way towards reducing delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), easing joint inflammation, and stimulating circulation in the lower body.
It works by improving blood flow to the areas of your body that are working the hardest while you’re running, like your calves, Achilles tendons, and hip flexors. You’ll get faster recovery times and reduced downtime between runs as a result.
In 2016, photobiomodulation researchers found that athletes who did red light therapy after exercise were able to recover faster, reported less muscle soreness, and even found that they had improved performance during their next workouts.
If you’re a runner looking for an edge to help you win the 5k fun run or a marathon, red light therapy could be just the thing you need to get there. Want to target a specific area? The G4 Tabletop is just the ticket!
How cyclists combat overuse and gain endurance with red light therapy
As a cyclist, you’re facing the same challenge as runners when it comes to endurance. The difference is that you’re getting strains on your joints and muscles. You’re getting repetitive, targeted stress to the lower body, especially the quads, hamstrings, glutes, and lower back.
When you’re sitting on a bike for many hours at a time, you’ll end up with hip flexors tightening up and compression of your lumbar. Climbing hills? Interval training? You’re going to end up experiencing muscle fatigue and micro-tears in your muscles. But you can get relief from all of that.
You can use red light therapy to speed up the time your muscles take to recover, while also reducing inflammation in the areas that give you the most trouble. By getting red light on your legs and lower back, you’ll be promoting circulation, increasing ATP production, and supporting cellular regeneration. Why is that a good thing? All of this leads to reduced muscle soreness and improvements in endurance recovery between your rides.
This is not just hearsay, by the way. There’s a study published in Lasers in Medical Science that found that cyclists who used red light therapy before their workouts could ride longer before fatigue set in, compared to those who didn’t. The light appears to support better oxygen delivery and waste removal at the cellular level, which is essential for anyone training to improve cycling endurance and performance.
Whether you’re someone who only has time to ride as much as you can on the weekends or a competitive cyclist, you’ll be able to fit red light therapy into your at-home recovery plan with no trouble at all. Check out Rouge’s panels. They allow athletes to target problem areas daily, in addition to the stretching, foam rolling, and other post-ride recovery techniques you’re already using.
Professional athletes using red light therapy
If you pay attention to what’s going on in the world of sports recovery techniques, you’ll probably have already heard about red light therapy. At this point, it’s way more than just a trend. It’s a technique backed by real science, with actual success stories from professional athletes.
Take Norwegian football star Erling Haalandre, for example. He is heavily invested in his health and does a lot to make sure he maintains his explosive speed and injury resistance. Beyond sitting in ice baths and spending time in a cryochamber, Haaland also uses a red light therapy bed.
His ability to recover between training sessions and matches shows how light therapy can help anyone with their endurance, muscle recovery, and injury prevention.
Professional goalkeeper, Aline Reis, uses Rouge RLT panels for muscle recovery and joint care both before and after training. Red light therapy is a cornerstone of her recovery plan, helping her reduce inflammation and avoid overuse injuries. She was looking for a reliable, quality brand that offered powerful devices while also being affordable when she discovered Rouge.
When asked about whether she would recommend red light therapy to athletes, she said, “I would recommend red light therapy to any human being interested in improving their health. Research has shown that red light therapy can improve your health at a cellular level, helping your mitochondria produce energy more efficiently. Even if you don’t remember what mitochondria are, all you need to know is that the list of RLT benefits is long, from improved body functions, better recovery, and sleep and beauty benefits.”
She went on to say, “Whether you’re a professional athlete looking to take your game to the next level, a student or an office worker looking to live their days to the fullest, red light therapy can be a game changer for you like it was for me.”
Whether you’re a runner, cyclist, or multi-sport athlete, the success of red light therapy in professional circles speaks volumes about its benefits for anyone training hard and recovering smart.
Red light therapy is accessible to everyone
One of the hardest parts of doing all of the different recovery routines you need to do to stay at the top of your game, is the accessibility of the treatments. Fortunately, red light therapy can be done in the comfort of your own home, and with a minimal investment in space. In some cases, like with the Rouge Nano, it’s only a little bit bigger than your phone.
Flexibility and ease of use means that you can recover at your own pace and in your own home. You doin’t have to book an appointment, or rely on invasive treatments. Just 10 to 20 minutes of red light exposure post-workout can reduce muscle soreness, support joint health, and get you on your way to recovery quickly and easily.
If you’re serious about long-term performance, red light therapy could be just the thing to prevent the cycle of injury (no pun intended) and burnout that you’ve experienced, ending up with a shorter season than you would have hoped for.
A natural edge in a competitive world
These days, people are investing in a lot of different gadgets, supplements, and performance hacks to increase their edge. Where red light therapy stands out in the crowd is its simplicity and its natural healing process. It doesn’t just mask pain or force you to learn a whole new way of running or cycling. Instead, it supports your body’s natural recovery mechanisms — helping you reduce inflammation, accelerate muscle repair, and improve endurance over time.
Whether you’re chasing a new personal best or training for your first long-distance event, staying consistent is the key to success. Consistent red light therapy, in addition to other helpful treatments, helps safeguard that consistency by shortening recovery windows, improving joint mobility, and easing the strain endurance sports place on your body.
Check out our FDA and TGA registered red light therapy devices.
FAQs: Red Light Therapy for Endurance Athletes
Q: How does red light therapy help with recovery after endurance training?
A: Red light therapy boosts your cells' energy production (ATP), which speeds up muscle repair, reduces inflammation, and helps your body recover from stress more efficiently after long rides or runs.
Q: Can red light therapy prevent overuse injuries?
A: While it won’t stop injuries on its own, red light therapy helps reduce inflammation and muscle fatigue — two major contributors to overuse injuries — so you can recover properly between training sessions.
Q: Is red light therapy easy to use at home?
A: Yes! Red light therapy is non-invasive, takes only 10–20 minutes per session, and fits easily into your post-workout recovery routine — no appointments, no downtime.