The R8 Plus: a Useful (and Quirky) Recovery Tool for Hike and Bike Road Trips

Because of this, I’ve collected quite a lot of various massage tools, from foam rollers to muscle recovery balls to resistance straps, lacrosse balls, massagers, and more. The space under my living room table looks like a physical therapist’s office. But I just added a new product to the lineup that makes my living room look a little more like a medieval dungeon than most people’s: it’s the R8 Plus Deep Tissue Massager from Roll Recovery, and with heavy metal bars and metallic springs, it looks more like a torture device than a massage tool. But once you learn how to use it, you’ll be saying less “eww” and more “ahhhh.”

Here’s my take on the R8 Plus as an athletic person who’s always off somewhere in the mountains — and advice on what kind of athlete will find the quirky recovery device worth the price.

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“What is that thing?”

That’s the very first thing my husband said when I took the large, somewhat intense-looking device out of the high-end packaging. The Roll Recovery R8 Plus works by using spring-loaded arms to apply consistent, adjustable pressure to your muscles with two ribbed rollers, squeezing muscle groups like the thighs, calves, and hamstrings. It’s easy to clamp around around the muscle group you want to massage, and it automatically adjusts to your body’s shape, delivering deep pressure without the need to push or move your body. The rollers smoothy compress your muscles, and it’s easy to use while sitting, standing, or lying on the floor moaning about how your calves feel like they’re about to explode.

The R8 Plus also has an adjustable dial to tweak the level of pressure. This is useful not just to accommodate various sizes of muscle groups (so you can make the pressure on your arm as tight as the pressure on your thighs), but also means one size fits all users.

Buy Now: $169

The R8 Plus: what we liked

Before I started using the R8 Plus, my go-to tools were a foam roller and a medium-sized textured massage ball, roughly the size of a grapefruit. While I still use both quite a bit, the R8 Plus is far easier to use, and works on a wider variety of muscle groups.

Foam rollers only work when you lay or sit on them, creating pressure under your weight. So they’re very hard to use for muscle groups where you can’t position your body weight entirely above them, like your calves or arms. But the R8 Plus’ pressure comes from the internal spring mechanism, so there’s zero pushing required to create pressure comparable to that of a  foam roller. That means you don’t need to roll around on the floor to use it . I’ve used it several times in the car on the way home from long bike rides (not while driving), as well as when I’m just sitting on the couch or getting ready for bed.

My favorite feature of the R8 Plus, though, actually relates to the rollers themselves. It’s the only tool I’ve found that works on very small, specific muscles, like my achilles or the tibialis interior (the long, thin muscle just on the outside of your shin bone). That’s because each roller has four rounded ridges on it. So if you position the R8 Plus correctly, you can get the ridge of a roller to really dig into small muscles with pointed, acute pressure. I haven’t found another tool that can push as specifically on tiny muscles groups, allowing me to work on loosening all the muscles in my legs, instead of just ignoring the smaller ones like I was before.

Buy Now: $169

The R8 Roller: overkill?

I’m not joking about how tight and tender my muscles usually are — I’m the only person who literally failed dry needling at my PT’s office (it caused a muscle spasm) and I burn through CBD lotions and IcyHot patches. But despite that, I don’t find the R8 Plus too strong, even on large muscles with it set on the tightest setting. If you want less pressure, you can just twist the adjustment to make the spring a little looser. I’ve had male and female friends of various sizes and athletic ability levels use try it, and most people seemed to like that the pressure is pretty strong.

But that said, some reviewers on Amazon have mentioned that they felt even the weakest setting was a bit too tight. If you’ve never used any kind of massager that digs into your muscles, you may want to test out the sensation with something cheaper (like a lacrosse ball or foam roller) before buying the R8 Plus, since it is about $170. If you don’t think you’ll need the adjustable pressure dial, the R8 without it (the non-plus version) is less pricey, at $140. It’s still spring loaded, so it’ll adjust to different sized muscle groups. It just doesn’t have the dial to make the pressure stronger or lighter.

Buy Now: $169

The R8 Plus: who will like it?

As someone who’s already a fan of foam rollers and daily stretching, I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve appreciated having a tool like the R8 Plus in my recovery toolkit. It’s easy to pick up when you’re sitting on the couch and do a few minutes of massage, which is helpful for people who often forget to stretch or can’t find time for a full muscle recovery session. Anyone who has sore muscles and is looking for a tool that can deeply kneed into various muscle groups will probably appreciate having the R8 Plus around, even if they don’t use it every day.

I’ve found that my leg muscles do feel immediately looser after using it, and after about 10 days of working the R8 Plus into my daily stretching and rolling routine, I found my leg fatigue after bike rides generally decreasing. I can’t credit that all to stretching and recovery, as a lot of factors go into fitness development, but I can say that I felt like my legs hurt less and warmed up a little quicker on most rides.

But aside from that generic answer — because, honestly, what active person doesn’t have sore leg muscles? — it’s a device that would be quite useful for anyone planning an active roadtrip. Since it adapts to all body sizes and is easy to use standing up, while in the car, and for just a few seconds at a time, it’s easy to use multiple times a day and could make a big difference in whether your leg muscles get too sore for multiple days of adventures in a row. It isn’t a replacement for the long-term factors that go into having strong and loose muscles, like rest days, varied forms of exercise, and a vaguely healthy diet, but when you just need a little TLC after an active day, it’s a welcome addition.

Buy Now: $169