PowerDot 4+

I have been a Jiu jitsu athlete for almost 20 years and have put my body through the ringer. Throw in mountain biking, snowboarding, and skateboarding and you have a recipe for aches and pains. I started using PowerDot when they first came out. I thought it was great back then. I have had a couple different versions of their devices and they have all performed amazingly. As I get new ones, I hand down the older models and even the very first one I bought is still in use. They last forever. I wish I had something good to say about their customer service or warranty, but I have no experience dealing with them because I have never had a single issue over the many years and models. I have also tried some other other devices you can get online, but those require you to manually set up parameters for each session. They are way more complicated and unless you really spend the time to learn everything about EMS and TENS, you probably won’t set it up correctly. My only gripe is that the butterfly pads don’t have a pull tab to help you remove them after use. Maybe they do now, I haven’t ordered any in while. Great product Josh/PowerDot.

I was really excited to find the powerdot because after several knee surgeries and recovery periods as an athlete I know how the technology has helped speed my recovery in the past. I also had some edicuatiom in kinesiology because I was interested in physical therapy as a job, I changed half way through and never got to the portion where we did clinical hours. So I’ve never placed EMS tabs myself.

One thing I think would be really helpful is if the images used to show you correct placement of the pads were illustrations to show the muscles rather than a photo. The photos that come in the package are excellent marketing material, but they’re pretty dark so it’s hard to figure out exactly where to place the pads. Sometimes I don’t seem to be getting the correct muscle flexion and end up moving them to try and find the right place.

I would also love to see some routines that are oriented around specific sports. For instance something that mixed together performance and strength to go along with mountain biking workouts that we’re doing. I’ve tried to make my own spreadsheet of performance, endurance, and strength in a rotation for the same muscle groups I work in the sports I do, but it’s a lot of extra work and I’m not sure I’m optimizing. I was excited when theragun bought this company Bc they do a great job of that in their app and made it easy.

After upgrading to iOS 17.1.2, one of the powerdots seems to not be able to connect through Bluetooth. I used it the day before upgrading the iOS version so not sure if that is related. On the website there are instructions to reset and reconnect but that doesn’t work and there’s very little help otherwise. The device itself is good but they should have some other ways to connect them other than through the Apple apps because if bugs come up you can’t use the device.

Update: I contacted customer support and they replaced my device as it was still under warranty. The process was very easy and straightforward. Everything is working properly so far. Overall a very positive experience.