Catching the LifeWave

The darned things seem to work.

You stick a couple small circular LifeWave patches on your ankles, your wrist or your chest and your athletic performance improves. It’s supposed to unclog the energy pathways that run through your body and enable you to work longer and harder.

We didn’t believe it either, so we talked a couple local competitive swimmers into trying it for a week. They didn’t change their training, their diets or their daily rest patterns. At the end of the week they went up to 8,100 feet from Glenwood Springs, where they train, to Aspen for the Western Slope Swimming Championships.

Stopwatches don’t lie and they were the only ones who swam at the higher altitude who lowered their personal-best times.

“If you’re not really excited, you’re not paying attention,” said local LifeWave distributor Eric Prouty.

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Then we learned that U.S. women’s swimming coach Richard Quick is on the bandwagon, along with enough professional and college athletes and coaches, along with British soccer star David Beckham, that the bandwagon’s getting pretty crowded.

Someone should have given Floyd Landis these instead a shot of artificial testosterone.

Prouty said they’re based on biotechnology that tells the body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates, producing twice the energy. The patches, one white and one tan, are worn on the wrists, ankles and chest, points familiar to those who’ve been involved with Eastern practices like acupuncture.

The white patch has amino acids, water and oxygen, Prouty said. The tan one has glucose, water and oxygen and that they are acitivated by the infra-red heat of the body.

“The simplest explanation of how they have an effect on the body, is in an analogy. We all have heard that when we’re in the sunlight, the body produces its own vitamin D,” said Prouty. “This is an example of a frequency (ultra-violet or infrared) producing a bio-chemical process within the body (vitamin D production). The patches are no different. The frequency that the patches emit signals the body to burn fat. Since two and a half times the calories are produced from burning fat as compared to sugar, we feel a sustained energy with the patches, where before we may have felt fatigue.”

The patches don’t contain any chemicals, Prouty said, and have been accepted as safe by England’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

Beckham was wearing the patches during a Real Madrid match and several Liverpool players use them, according to a story in the London Daily Mirror.

“People may be skeptical but those who use the patches are top basketball players in the US, 80 of the top female pro golfers, and Real Madrid players,” Beckham told the Mirror. “Why would all of these people wear them if there was no benefit?”

Nothing enters the body with the LifeWave patches, no steroids, stimulants, protein packs or anything else that isn’t supposed to be there. The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency tested the product and found no banned substances, according to an ESPN story.

Still, Troy State’s football team was using them and the NCAA asked them to stop, saying they were concerned about amino acids.

LifeWave is available through multi-level marketing people, not stores. That means sales people recruit other sales people who recruit more sales people who recruit more sales people, and so on.

They were invented by David Schmidt, who has patches that are supposed to do four different things: The Sleep Patch is supposed to signal the body to produce seratonin and melatonin. The Pain Patch is supposed to signal the body to produce it’s own dopamine. The Skin Renewal Patch signals the body to produce its own glutathione.

LifeWave promoters say you’ll experience an increased level of energy, not like a caffeine buzz, but as an overall increase in energy, stamina, and performance. They say that in a double blind placebo controlled studies with athletes, they found a 20 percent increase on the low side, with an average increase of approximately 40 percent.

Some doctors say a sugar pill will do the same thing.

“If you tell somebody that this is going to make you stronger, faster and better, there’s a 20 to 30 percent chance that even if there is nothing in the pill or the patch the person will get 20 to 30 percent better. That’s what we call the placebo effect,” said Dr. Deborah Saint-Phard with M.D. Sports Medicine.

Vail, Colorado