Vanguard Loadout is a physician-led review site for health-optimization gear: sleep technology, wearables, sauna, cold plunge, light therapy, recovery tools, vital-signs devices, performance accessories, and skin care.
The premise is simple. The optimization space is loud, overbought, and short on long-term, hands-on, evidence-vetted opinion from anyone with a medical background. There is a real difference between gear that earns its place in a routine and gear that just photographs well. We sort the two.
The operator
Kris Crawford, MD is a practicing emergency physician with more than twenty years in the specialty. He is also the operator of Vanguard Optimization, the educational membership platform that covers the medical and physiologic side of health optimization. Vanguard Loadout is the gear-side sister project — same standards, different deliverable.
What we cover
Nine categories: Sleep, Wearables, Heat, Cold, Light, Recovery, Vital Signs, Performance, and Skin Care. Within each, we publish individual product reviews, buying guides, head-to-head comparisons, and multi-generation retrospectives on the wearables and devices we have used long enough to have a real opinion.
What we do not cover: oral supplements, vitamins, ingested or injected peptides, or biologics. That is Vanguard Optimization's territory. Topical formulations — including topical peptides like OneSkin OS-01 — are in scope here, because skin care is part of the loadout, not part of the regimen.
The brand promise
Health gear that earns its place in your routine. That is the editorial bar. A product makes the cut when it meaningfully changes outcomes a clinician would care about — sleep quality, cardiovascular fitness, recovery capacity, skin health, daily comfort — not when it photographs well or trends on a podcast.
Premium and value picks both earn space when they win. A $2,000 product that delivers what a $10,000 product promises gets recommended on its merits. The point is accurate ranking, not a price floor.
How we work
Every product we recommend has been used in real conditions for long enough to have a view that is worth publishing. When we rank a product against alternatives we have not personally used, we say so plainly and explain how we evaluated them. Full criteria are on the methodology page.
We earn affiliate commissions when readers buy through our links. Commission structure does not influence our recommendations. The editorial firewall is documented on the disclosure page.
The Loadout
Once a quarter we publish The Vanguard Loadout — a single, edited list of the gear we are actually using that quarter, by category. One pick per slot, with the reasoning. It is the signature piece of the site, and it is meant to be useful in the most direct way possible: if you wanted to set up a serious routine from scratch and you wanted a physician's current answer, this is it.
Sister site
Vanguard Optimization (vanguardoptimization.com) is the educational membership side of the operation. If you want the underlying medical and physiologic case for any of the categories Vanguard Loadout covers — what the research says about cold exposure, red light, sleep architecture, recovery — that is where to read.
The two sites share the operator and the standards. They do not share an editorial scope.
Get in touch
Newsletter — Field Notes, short and useful, sent when there is something worth saying.
Reader mail — field-notes@vanguardloadout.com
Press, partnership, and affiliate inquiries — kris@vanguardloadout.com
Vanguard Loadout is published by Crawford Medical LLC.