Ice baths are becoming even more popular and accessible with people purchasing them for home use and gyms offering them as a recovery modality. In this blog we’ll look into if Ice Baths are beneficial.
The literature is still trying to catch up on Ice Baths as there’s so many variables including duration of immersion, temperature etc. But there is quite a lot of literature on Cold Water Immersion or CWI (The previous name for Ice baths) CWI has been around from quite some time. The idea behind it is generally to reduce DOMS, speed up recovery, reduce inflammation and swelling. Some contraindications for Ice baths are high blood pressure, circulatory problems, diabetes, any conditions that would increase your sensitivity to cold.
However recent literature has shown that Ice Baths can inhibit or reduce your adaptation to strength or hypertrophy training. So if you are in the gym looking to increase muscle mass or increase strength, using ice baths to recover has been shown to reduce those hypertrophy adaptations over time. As the cold water causes reduced metabolism, reduced swelling and reduced inflammation which inhibits satellite cells in our muscles and slows different pathways that help us recover and signal to our body to produce more muscle, based on the stimulus we just had.
If aiming for hypertrophy or muscle growth leave ice baths at least 24 to 48 hours between your heavy resistance sessions, if it doesn’t fit in your week, there’s lots of other things you can do to improve your recovery such as massage, sleep, nutrition, which can assist in recovery without these negative consequences. But, If you have a short recovery time between matches or something physically demanding/competitive, ice baths can have a positive application by reducing muscle soreness within that short window of time.
Another study that looked at cold showers which showed that people who took them had less sick days from work so they’re correlated, cold water immersion to a better immune system. Being in an ice bath activates the sympathetic nervous system which can cause improvements in mood from increases in hormones such as oxytocin and dopamine which is your feel-good hormone that tends to last 3-5 hours and we’re in a good mood for the day, so potentially are more productive. It can also help you to adapt to stress over time as whenever you have an ice bath it adds stress, which your body then adapts to, so you can then handle stress better from the resilience acquired from CWI.
If you are looking for more information on recovery, we have an optimising recovery short course at the Australian Fitness Academy, which covers cold water immersion, sleep, nutrition, periodised and structuring trainings to make sure you are recovering, compression, cold therapies, static stretching, active recovery, massage, foam rolling and also electro-stimulation. Whether you’re in the industry already and need to get some CEC points, or you want to improve your knowledge and have a look into the recovery side of things
