Black Root Recovery: The Multi‑Modality Recovery Sauna Built for Veterans, Athletes, and High Performers #827
Barbell Shrugged
Doug Larson
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Former Marine and general contractor Andrew Kavanaugh joins the crew to share the origin story of Black Root Recovery, a company he founded after watching too many of his fellow Marines struggle physically, mentally, and emotionally after returning home. What started as a personal quest to rebuild his health led to a 90-pound weight loss, the elimination of sleep apnea and nightmares, and a profound shift in cognitive clarity and emotional resilience. Andrew combined the modalities that changed his own life (grounding, infrared therapy, red-light therapy, and traditional sauna heat) into a single premium, custom-built recovery system designed to reduce inflammation, support brain health, and help veterans and high performers reclaim their capability.
Andrew breaks down the science and practical application behind each component of the system, including his patented grounding design that connects the user directly to an eight-foot copper ground rod to immediately reduce blood viscosity and "electrical noise" in the body. Paired with deep-penetrating red light panels, infrared heat, and a high-output traditional sauna, his units create a stacked recovery environment that improves circulation, reduces inflammation, accelerates healing, and enhances cognitive performance. Andrew shares how, after three months of daily use, he saw his social anxiety disappear, his brain function sharpen, and his jiu-jitsu endurance skyrocket.
The conversation expands into the broader mission: supporting veterans, giving athletes a competitive performance advantage, and scaling access to recovery tools that have historically been too expensive or too fragmented to deliver real transformation. Andrew discusses future plans to build custom installations for gyms and sports teams, and continue refining the multimodal system. Whether the goal is longevity, recovery, or helping those who have served, this episode reveals why integrated recovery environments may become the next frontier in reducing inflammation, healing trauma, and elevating human potential.
Links:
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Shrug family this week on Barbell Shrugged. Andrew Kavanaugh from Black Root Recovery is on the podcast. |
| 0:06.1 | And today we're going to be digging into the most comprehensive sauna you've ever heard of your entire life. |
| 0:12.0 | Everybody knows songs are like extremely good for you. |
| 0:15.0 | There's tons of science saying you need to get in there. |
| 0:17.1 | It's good for your heart health. |
| 0:18.4 | It's good for sweating out all the toxins and just feeling |
| 0:21.8 | good. It's way cooler than being incredibly cold and like a cold tub. Everybody likes to get |
| 0:26.9 | hot and sweat. But on top of that, Andrew's story coming from a military background, PTSD, |
| 0:33.6 | how he's been helping veterans in the military and what led him to designing really the most comprehensive sauna. |
| 0:40.0 | So it's not just on the heat side or just on the infrared side, |
| 0:43.2 | but really adding tons of recovery elements so that you can stack all of the winds on top |
| 0:48.6 | and have the most enjoyable experience sitting there and get your sweat on. |
| 0:53.5 | As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. |
| 0:57.0 | That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle performance analysis. |
| 1:00.8 | And you can access that over at rapid health report.com. |
| 1:05.2 | Friends, let's get into the show. |
| 1:08.8 | Welcome to Barb Bell Strug. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash. Andrew Kavanaugh, dear friends, the, the maker of Mark Farmer, for those rapid health optimization fans out there. Mark has been on the show as well. He probably got lots and lots of Instagram followers. |
| 1:30.2 | But welcome to the show, man. You built his sauna. This isn't like a regular sauna. As I was |
| 1:35.7 | joking around, this is like the old rap song. It's like a sauna that rides on 22s. This is, |
| 1:41.7 | I can't believe we worked that into the intro here. |
| 1:45.9 | But I'd love to, |
| 1:47.1 | first off, um, |
... |
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