Why Red Light Therapy? From Career-Ending Hip Surgery to 48 Hours on Lytham Beach
How a rugby career, an engineering mindset and a stubborn refusal to accept the first answer led to TAFIT.
By Tom Armstrong, founder of True Athletic Fitness and TA/LIGHTS
There is a particular silence that follows a consultant telling you that you will not play sport again.
Not just rugby. Sport. That was the part that landed hardest.
I was 27 years old. I had come through Pilkington Recs, made my first-team debut for St Helens against Warrington in 2009 and scored that day. I went on to represent clubs including Leigh, Swinton, Sheffield, Widnes and Toronto, building a career of nearly 200 professional appearances and almost 100 tries.
My body had always been the thing I trusted most. It was how I competed, earned a living, expressed myself and understood who I was.
Then I was lying on a hospital bed after hip arthroscopy, being told by highly qualified people that my sporting life was effectively over.
I want to be fair to the medical team before going any further. Based on the scans, the degeneration in my hip and the evidence available to them, their conclusion was understandable. They were not trying to destroy my ambitions. They were giving me what they believed was an honest prognosis.
But there is a difference between a prognosis and a final verdict.
They were describing what was likely. I heard a challenge.
This is the story of what happened next: the setbacks, the late-night research, the technology I discovered and the long road back to doing things my body had supposedly finished doing. It is also the story of how I learned to question extraordinary claims without immediately dismissing extraordinary possibilities.
That balance now sits at the heart of TAFIT.
The operation was meant to fix me
The surgery was supposed to be the answer. It was not.
What followed was months of rehabilitation, small improvements and setbacks that seemed to erase them. Anyone who has lived through a long recovery will recognise the pattern.
You have two good weeks and start to believe you are finally turning a corner. Then you wake up one morning stiff, sore and unable to do something that felt manageable the day before.
The mental arithmetic begins again. Am I actually improving? Was yesterday just a good day? Am I making this worse? How long can I keep doing this?
Retirement did not arrive as one dramatic decision. It came through the accumulation of enough bad mornings, failed attempts and difficult circumstances until continuing to play professionally no longer made sense.
Eventually, I hung up my boots.
That sentence makes retirement sound much cleaner than it really was.
I had been a professional athlete since my late teens. Rugby was not simply something I did at weekends. It shaped my routines, friendships, ambitions, income and identity.
When it disappeared, I did not immediately feel grateful for the career I had enjoyed. I felt frustrated, physically broken and lost.
I was in pain when I moved. I was in pain after rehabilitation. Some mornings I was in pain before I had properly moved at all. Mentally, I was struggling too.
I did not set out to create a wellness business. I set out to stop hurting.
The unlikely advantage of an engineering degree
My route into recovery took an unusual turn because alongside professional rugby, I had completed a master's degree in petroleum engineering at the University of Manchester.
At first glance, petroleum engineering has very little to do with hip rehabilitation. Thankfully, my degree had taught me something more useful than the subject printed on the certificate.
It taught me how to research.
Engineering teaches you to break a complicated problem into smaller parts. It teaches you to look for the mechanism, question assumptions, compare competing explanations and check whether the conclusion is genuinely supported by the data. It also teaches you that a confident answer and a correct answer are not necessarily the same thing.
I knew how to search academic databases, read research papers and follow citation trails back to the original source. I knew that one exciting study proved very little and that a hundred poor-quality studies did not automatically create good evidence.
Most importantly, I was willing to sit with uncertainty.
When the mainstream answer appeared to be “manage the decline”, I wanted to understand whether that was the entire picture or simply the best answer generally available at the time.
So I started reading. Late at night, early in the morning and whenever my brain would not switch off, I worked my way through research papers, rehabilitation theories, emerging treatments and more than a few rabbit holes.
Some of what I found was useful. A great deal of it was nonsense.
There were poorly designed trials, exaggerated conclusions, commercial claims dressed up as science and fringe practitioners promising to cure almost everything. For every promising lead, there seemed to be ten dead ends and at least one person selling a miracle in a shiny bottle.
But one term kept appearing.
Photobiomodulation. Red and near-infrared light therapy.
Why photobiomodulation caught my attention
Red light therapy sounded unusual, but the research behind it was not new. That mattered.
I was not looking at a technology supported by three testimonials, an influencer and an optimistic founder. I found decades of laboratory and clinical research involving specific wavelengths of red and near-infrared light.
The NASA connection is often oversimplified in marketing. NASA did not invent photobiomodulation. The more accurate story is that LED technology was investigated for growing plants in space, and NASA-supported work later explored medical uses including cellular growth and wound healing.
That did not prove that every red light device worked, or that the technology could treat every condition attached to it online. It did show that this was not merely a recent wellness trend.
There was serious scientific interest, plausible biological mechanisms and a growing body of research in areas including pain, tissue recovery, exercise performance and rehabilitation.
What fascinated me most was the gap between the research and public awareness.
In 2019, few people I knew were discussing photobiomodulation. Plenty of health professionals had never used it. Some dismissed it immediately because it looked too simple or sounded too alternative.
I had seen this pattern before. A concept can sit outside mainstream practice for years, not necessarily because it is false, but because the evidence is still developing, the protocols are inconsistent or the route into everyday practice is unclear.
That gap is interesting. It is also dangerous.
Sometimes an overlooked idea is genuinely valuable. Sometimes it has been overlooked because it does not work.
The job is not to believe everything outside the mainstream. The job is to investigate it properly.
How red light therapy may work
Photobiomodulation uses non-ionising red or near-infrared light to influence biological processes without heating or damaging tissue in the way a surgical laser would. The response depends on factors including wavelength, irradiance, treatment time, distance, tissue type and total dose.
The mechanism is often reduced to a neat marketing sentence: red light stimulates the mitochondria, increases ATP and helps the body heal.
That may be a useful introduction, but the real science is more complicated.
Mitochondria and cellular energy
Mitochondria help produce adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which cells use to power many of their normal functions.
One leading theory proposes that red and near-infrared photons interact with components of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, particularly an enzyme called cytochrome c oxidase. This interaction may influence cellular respiration, signalling and energy availability.
However, it is important not to present this as completely settled science. Cytochrome c oxidase remains an important proposed target, but researchers continue to debate precisely how much of the response is caused by direct absorption at this enzyme and how much involves other chromophores, ion channels, water structures and signalling pathways.
In plain English, light appears capable of influencing how stressed cells behave, but the full chain of events is still being worked out.
Nitric oxide and blood flow
Nitric oxide is another part of the picture.
Under certain cellular conditions, nitric oxide can interact with cytochrome c oxidase and affect mitochondrial respiration. Light may alter some of these interactions and may also influence nitric oxide signalling more broadly. That could affect circulation, oxygen use and cellular communication.
Again, this is a working biological model, not permission to claim that shining light on the body automatically “releases nitric oxide, boosts ATP and repairs everything”.
Biology rarely respects a three-line sales graphic.
A small stress signal can be useful
Photobiomodulation may also cause a temporary change in reactive oxygen species and the cell's redox state.
Reactive oxygen species are often described only as harmful. In excessive amounts they can contribute to damage, but in controlled amounts they also act as signals. Those signals may activate pathways involved in antioxidant defence, inflammatory regulation, cellular survival and tissue adaptation.
This resembles hormesis, the broader principle through which a manageable stressor can stimulate a beneficial adaptive response.
Training works partly through this logic. Exercise temporarily disrupts the body, and the recovery process makes it better prepared for the next exposure. Photobiomodulation may trigger some related signalling pathways, although it does not replace training, rehabilitation, nutrition or sleep.
Red and near-infrared light are not interchangeable
Different wavelengths interact with tissue differently.
Red wavelengths are generally used for more superficial targets such as the skin and tissue closer to the surface. Near-infrared wavelengths generally travel further through tissue and are commonly selected when the target is deeper, such as a larger muscle or joint area.
That does not mean every photon reaches the structure printed on the product brochure. Penetration depends on skin, body composition, blood flow, treatment angle, power, distance and the tissue between the device and the intended target.
Wavelength matters, but wavelength alone does not define a useful treatment.
The part most marketing leaves out: dose
Photobiomodulation is not simply about switching on the brightest panel available and standing in front of it until boredom wins.
Dose matters. A simplified calculation is:
Dose in J/cm² = irradiance in W/cm² × exposure time in seconds
Even that calculation does not tell the whole story because the stated output of a device may differ from the amount actually reaching the skin. Distance, angle, pulsing, treatment area and measurement quality all influence the delivered dose.
Photobiomodulation also appears to follow a biphasic dose response.
- Too little exposure may produce no meaningful effect.
- An appropriate exposure may produce the desired biological response.
- Too much may reduce the benefit or create an inhibitory response.
That means more power, more time and more sessions are not automatically better.
This helps explain why studies can produce conflicting results. Two trials may both be described as “red light therapy” while using different wavelengths, treatment areas, power densities, timing and total doses. They may be testing interventions that share a name but are practically very different.
It also explains why responsible red light therapy should be based on protocols rather than guesswork.
Turning myself into the test subject
I read for months before buying my first unit. Then I did what any slightly obsessive former athlete with an engineering degree and an overactive brain might do. I turned myself into the test subject.
I built red light into a much broader rehabilitation programme that included:
- Hip distraction and mobility work
- Structured stretching
- Acupuncture
- Physiotherapy
- Progressive strength training
- Red and near-infrared light therapy
The words built into are important. Red light did not replace rehabilitation. It was one part of the system.
Initially, I expected very little. That was deliberate. I had read enough research by then to understand expectation effects and how badly a person in pain can want the next intervention to be the answer.
After several sessions, something seemed to shift. I noticed less discomfort following physiotherapy. My hip felt less severe in the mornings. The change was not dramatic enough to make a film about, but it was consistent enough to make me pay attention.
For someone living with a degenerating joint, the morning is an honest test. Before the day warms you up, before adrenaline or movement changes the sensation, your body tends to tell you exactly where it stands.
Mine was beginning to feel different.
I gradually experimented with short, targeted sessions and longer full-body exposure. I also found the ritual itself useful. Time in front of the light became a moment when I was actively working on my recovery rather than waiting for the next appointment or being told what I could no longer do.
That psychological change mattered. After months of feeling managed, I felt involved again.
My experience is not proof
This is where many founder stories become sales pitches, so let me draw a clear line.
My experience was an n=1 self-experiment. It was not blinded. I desperately wanted to improve. I was simultaneously changing several other variables, including rehabilitation, strength work, mobility and acupuncture.
I cannot scientifically separate the contribution of red light from those other interventions, natural recovery, placebo effects or regression towards the mean.
If someone presented my story to me as clinical proof, I would pull it apart.
My story is not the evidence. My story is the reason I went looking at the evidence.
That distinction matters, particularly because I now sell red light therapy products.
What does the evidence support?
The answer depends on the outcome, the condition, the device and the protocol. That is less exciting than saying red light “works”, but it is far more useful.
Exercise and muscle performance
Several reviews suggest that targeted photobiomodulation applied to working muscles, particularly before exercise, may improve aspects of endurance, fatigue resistance and recovery in some populations.
A 2024 systematic review reported improvements in muscle endurance and some recovery markers in athletes and sedentary participants, but not consistently in all physically active groups.
The wording matters. It does not mean every athlete will perform better after standing near any red panel.
Much of the performance research has used targeted treatments on specific muscle groups under controlled conditions. Protocols vary significantly, and positive findings cannot automatically be transferred to every whole-body consumer device.
Whole-body photobiomodulation
Whole-body systems are commercially popular, but the research base is newer and less conclusive than the evidence for some targeted applications.
A 2025 systematic review found possible improvements in sleep quality but did not find clear evidence that whole-body photobiomodulation improved exercise recovery or performance. The authors called for further research.
As someone who sells full-body systems, I think that result should be stated openly. It does not prove whole-body exposure has no value. It means the claims must remain proportionate to the evidence we currently have.
Pain and rehabilitation
Evidence for pain is condition-specific rather than universal.
For example, a 2024 systematic review found that photobiomodulation could reduce pain and improve disability in people with knee osteoarthritis, while also calling for better standardisation and more research into treatment parameters.
That is promising. It is not the same as proving that red light repairs damaged cartilage or reverses every degenerative joint condition.
Wound and tissue recovery
Laboratory, animal and clinical studies have investigated photobiomodulation in wound healing and tissue repair for decades. Some findings are encouraging, but outcomes vary by wound type, wavelength, dose and patient population.
The sensible conclusion is not that red light heals everything. It is that specific applications show enough promise to deserve serious investigation and carefully designed protocols.
Anyone telling you photobiomodulation has been conclusively proven for every condition is probably selling something. Anyone telling you it is all imaginary has probably not read enough of the research.
The truth is more interesting than either extreme.
What I did with the body that was supposedly finished
I did not simply get back to walking without wincing. Over time, I started testing what my body could do again.
I entered endurance events. I ran ultras, including the route along Hadrian's Wall. I moved into triathlon and Ironman-distance events. I rebuilt my strength and conditioning. Years after leaving professional rugby league, I returned to the pitch with Fylde as a player and strength and conditioning coach.
None of that happened because I stood in front of a light and waited for athletic performance to arrive. It came through years of rehabilitation, training, setbacks, lifestyle changes and a willingness to keep adapting.
Red light was one tool within that process.
The challenge that meant the most to me, however, was not a race.
In November 2023, I dragged a sled loaded to approximately 100 kg across Lytham St Annes beach for 48 hours to raise awareness and money for the mental health organisation Talk Your Walk.
The weight was deliberate. It represented the invisible burden people can carry through depression, anxiety and mental suffering.
Dragging your own bodyweight across wet sand is brutally simple. There is no complicated technique and nowhere to hide. You keep moving, stop briefly when necessary and then find a reason to move again.
That was the closest physical representation I could create of what mental suffering can feel like. Heavy. Relentless. Mostly invisible to everybody else.
The man lying on the hospital bed at 27 would not have believed that paragraph.
Why I founded TA/LIGHTS
At some point, a simple question emerged. If this technology had become a useful part of my recovery, why were so few people being taught how to use it properly?
I was already working in fitness and strength and conditioning. I understood athletes, rehabilitation and performance environments. I had experienced the confusion of choosing a device, interpreting the research and trying to build a sensible protocol.
So I created True Athletic Lights, now TA/LIGHTS, as part of the wider TAFIT brand.
The goal was not merely to sell red panels. It was to help people understand what they were buying, why the specifications mattered and how the equipment could fit into a wider health, recovery or performance system.
Since then, we have supplied individuals, gyms, sports facilities, hotels, spas and commercial wellness spaces. We also work with customers to develop bespoke installations rather than asking every facility to squeeze itself around an off-the-shelf product.
I need to state the conflict clearly: I sell red light therapy equipment. You should factor that into everything I write about it.
My responsibility is therefore higher, not lower.
I should show the limitations as clearly as the benefits. I should separate mechanistic theory from clinical evidence. I should explain when research used a targeted laser rather than a full-body LED panel. I should never use my recovery story as proof that another person will experience the same result.
Trust does not come from pretending I have no commercial interest. It comes from being transparent about that interest and giving readers enough information to challenge me.
The next stage: the automated recovery environment
My professional life has now brought another perspective into the business. I work as a systems and control engineer.
My day job involves automation, instrumentation, feedback loops, safety systems and making complex processes operate predictably.
The more I work in engineering, the clearer the future of fitness and wellness becomes.
The next generation of gyms will not simply contain more equipment. They will become more responsive.
I do not mean robots wandering around handing out dumbbells or shouting motivational quotes in an American accent. Nobody needs that before 6am.
I mean facilities where recovery and performance systems can adapt to the individual using them.
A properly designed automated red light environment could eventually combine:
- User identification and individual session profiles
- Controlled distance and exposure time
- Verified device output
- Recipe-based wavelength and intensity settings
- Occupancy detection and safety interlocks
- Session history and cumulative exposure records
- Integration with training load, sleep and recovery data
- Remote condition monitoring and maintenance diagnostics
- Clear audit trails for commercial operators
Instead of a panel being fixed to a wall beside a laminated sign saying “use for ten minutes”, the system could control the actual variables that determine the delivered exposure.
That is where my two worlds meet.
The athlete understands what the user wants to achieve. The coach understands that every intervention must fit the wider programme. The engineer understands that repeatable outcomes require measurement, control and feedback.
This does not mean replacing coaches, therapists or clinicians. It means giving them better tools and removing unnecessary guesswork.
The future may involve recovery spaces that respond to an athlete's training phase, a hotel guest's goals or a gym member's history. Sessions could be programmed, monitored and adjusted while still respecting safety, privacy and the limits of the evidence.
That is the direction I believe TAFIT can help lead. We began with red light panels. The bigger goal is an intelligent performance and wellness environment.
Why my ADHD brain deserves some credit
For years, I treated my constantly active brain as something that needed controlling.
It jumps between ideas, finds patterns, asks another question before the first one has finished and occasionally decides that 1am is the perfect time to investigate mitochondrial signalling.
That can be exhausting. It can also be useful.
The same mind that struggles to leave a question alone is the one that worked through hundreds of research papers after being told to accept decline.
Open-mindedness also played a part. Being open-minded does not mean believing every exciting claim. It means being willing to investigate an unfamiliar idea without accepting or rejecting it prematurely.
The standard should always be:
- What does the evidence actually show?
- What type of study produced the result?
- What dose and equipment were used?
- Who was studied?
- How large was the effect?
- Has it been repeated?
- What are the conflicts of interest?
- What evidence would change my mind?
That is how I want TAFIT to think. Curious enough to investigate. Disciplined enough to say no.
What this blog is here to do
Red light therapy was my entry point into a much larger question: what useful ideas are sitting between established practice and unsupported hype?
That is where this blog will operate.
We will explore recovery, performance, longevity and emerging wellness technologies. We will look at light, sound, vibration, sleep, testing, training, environmental design and the systems connecting them.
Some topics will have strong evidence. Some will be promising but early. Some will sound brilliant and collapse as soon as the studies are opened.
We will publish all three.
For every subject, the questions will remain the same: what does the evidence say? At what dose? In which population? Compared with what? What are the limitations?
Sometimes the answer will be: this looks useful, here is how to consider using it.
At other times it will be: we looked properly, the evidence is not there yet, save your money.
A platform that only ever finds good news is not an educational platform. It is a catalogue wearing glasses.
There is an athlete in all of us
My identity as an athlete was taken away at 27.
I found it again through research, rehabilitation, training and a stubborn refusal to accept that the first answer had to be the final one.
Red light therapy did not rebuild my life on its own. But it became part of a process that helped me move from pain and uncertainty back towards performance, purpose and possibility.
That process eventually became TAFIT.
Today, we help individuals and organisations create better environments for training, recovery and wellness. We supply red light systems, develop bespoke commercial installations and work alongside gyms, hotels, spas and other facilities that want to offer something more considered than simply adding another machine to the floor.
Because there is an athlete in all of us. Not necessarily a professional one. Not necessarily one chasing medals.
The athlete is the part of you that wants to improve, test your limits and discover what your body and mind can still become.
I thought I had lost mine. It turned out he was still there, waiting for me to ask better questions.
To discuss a personal system, commercial installation or bespoke recovery space, contact the TAFIT team: support@tafit.co
This article is provided for education and general information. It is not medical advice and does not claim to diagnose, treat or cure any condition. Speak to an appropriately qualified healthcare professional before using photobiomodulation for an injury or medical condition. Device specifications, treatment parameters and individual suitability vary.