Leonard Williams uses at-home recovery room, dominates most Seahawks games
Meet Alternative Leonard Williams.
He loves added oxygen and infrared heat.
The 11th-year veteran Pro Bowl defensive end does the recovery and rehabilitation in his team’s training room. That is standard for a player to get through a 17-game NFL season.
But Williams now goes beyond that. He’s been making fancy additions to his home overlooking Lake Washington near Seahawks headquarters.
His man cave is his recovery room.
In it, Williams has a padded massage table. He has a red room, which is an infrared-light sauna.
He also has a hyperbaric chamber. A sleeping-bag-looking device pulses pure oxygen through his body as he lays inside.
Williams uses the hyperbaric chamber about two to three times each week, 90 minutes to two hours each time. He especially likes to use it before he goes to bed. He feels it helps him sleep. He also feels it aids recovery from the many swollen parts of his body he has after playing in the constant car crashes that are NFL games each weekend. All that’s just inside his house.
Outside he has what’s become a hydrotherapy deck. It overlooks the lake. On it, Williams has installed a squarish hot tub with water jets. Next to that, he dumps bags of ice into a cylinder-shaped cold tub. He alternates time hopping in and out of each tub.
Williams showed off his recovery room and deck this week on his Instagram account. To him, those rooms are how and why he’s had 11 sacks in his last 11 games and played in 38 of a possible 39 games the last three seasons. That’s since Seattle traded with the New York Giants to acquire the two-time Pro Bowl end in October 2023. The home work is working. Williams continues to be one of the more dominant players on the field in most Seahawks games. He’s the primary reason Seattle through four games this season are among the league’s best at pressuring and affecting quarterbacks, while among the lowest-rate blitz teams.
The Seahawks are winning rushing just their front four. That allows seven defenders in pass coverage, often against four receivers. Those numbers, and results, have been in the Seahawks’ favor.
Williams is doing the majority of the winning.
“He doesn’t get enough love nationally,” Macdonald said this week. “I know teams respect the heck out of him. Without getting into all the trade (secrets), inside football here, teams account for him, and it’s very obvious on (film) that they do that.
“He can stay as productive as he is, while he’s the focal point of what they’re doing.
“Game-wrecker is a great way to describe him. He definitely deserves more love.
“I have a hard time thinking there is another defensive lineman playing better than him.”
Leonard Williams’ recovery room
Williams talked about his home recovery rooms while back at work Thursday, before practice for Sunday’s game between the Seahawks (3-1) and the defending NFC South-champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers (3-1) at Lumen Field (1:05 p.m., CBS television, KIRO channel 7 locally).
He was wearing a shirt Macdonald had made for his players: CHASING EDGES.
Williams said he began getting heavily into hydrotherapy at home about a half-dozen years ago. That was after the New York Jets that drafted him sixth overall in 2015 out of USC traded him to the Giants.
“It’s funny. When I was young I used to take pride, stupidly, in not doing recovery and being OK physically,” Williams said. “But now that I’m older and been playing for a long time — and want to continue playing for a long time — recovery is a big part of my routine these days.”
The latest addition to his room is the hyperbaric chamber. Pro athletes, including Seahawks, have been buying and using those at home for years. Pro Bowl defensive end Patrick Kerney, a star on Seattle’s first Super Bowl team in 2005, used one. Seahawks Super Bowl-winning quarterback Russell Wilson, with the team from 2012-21, said he owned two.
Williams says this offseason he began going to a facility with a “more advanced” version of a hyperbaric chamber that gets him 100%-pure oxygen. He said his version at home is 25% oxygen.
He said he brings his iPad in the oxygen tent to watch game-scouting film. Or he plays hand-held video games, or music, while he recharges his body for the next Seahawks game.
“It’s a nice way to just decompress and also get some therapy at the same time,” he said.
It’s so relaxing, does he dare sleep inside his hyperbaric chamber?
No. There is a limit to recommended time in them, to avoid oxygen toxicity.
“I don’t go to sleep in there,” Williams said. “But I do set an alarm in there in case I do.”
In 2021, he had an elbow injury that threatened to end his season with the Giants. Months earlier he had signed a $63 million contract extension with New York, to reward his career-high 11 1/2 sacks with the Giants in 2020.
“I had a small bone spur in my elbow and I had to play with an elbow brace,” Williams said Thursday. “I just remember that was a pretty tough season for me. We were losing a lot. I was pretty banged up physically.
“Then I just started thinking more about longevity of my career and post-career as well.” That begs the question...
How long does Leonard Williams want to play?
Last week before he and the Seahawks played the Cardinals, Williams marveled at Arizona’s six-time Pro Bowl pass rusher Calais Campbell playing his 18th NFL season, at age 39.
The 31-year-old Williams chuckled and said last week: “It’s hard to say if I want to play 10 more years right now.”
He laughed. It sounded like a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me laugh. Immediately after the Seahawks beat the Cardinals 23-20 on the final play last week, Williams and Campbell met in the middle of the field.
Now Williams has a souvenir decoration to hang in his recovery room at home.
“I talked to him after the game, actually, and, I was just saying I respect him a lot, and he’s been playing for a long time,” Williams said of Campbell. “And we sent each other some jerseys, this past week.”
Williams’ talk Thursday about his recovery rooms and home methods that have kept him rollin’ week after week, year after year led to the question of how much longer he wants to play
“I’m not sure,” Williams said. “I want to play as long as possible. As long as I still love it. As long as I’m still feeling good physically, mentally, which I feel like I have a few more years left in me of that.
“But it’s hard to say I want to play another five, 10, it’s hard to put a number on it at this point. Because let’s say I say five and then by the time five years comes around, I want to play five more. So it’s hard to put a number on it.
“But right now, I feel pretty good.”
This story was originally published October 2, 2025 at 4:25 PM.
