When To Use Cold Therapy in Your Recovery
Cold water, cryotherapy or any extreme cold-induced therapies have gained a great deal of popularity in the last 5-10 years, with cryotherapy centers popping up around cities across North America. I’ve also seen more and more gyms with housing horse-trough looking contraptions for the purpose of cold water immersion.
Many individuals and organizations tout the use and efficacy of cold water therapy, and rightfully so. There’s a lot of data to support it’s efficacy. It also passes the “smell test”— ie: people like it and it feels good. However, there’s also a counter-point that’s not as often discussed: does cold water immersion ever work against you?
The answer is yes, *but* the real and more nuanced answer is: it depends on your situation and what you’re trying to accomplish. Cold therapy can be your best ally, but also may contribute to you spinning your own wheels. I italicize “may contribute” because let’s be realistic, a cold bath or shower won’t derail your training and render you useless.
Let’s explore.
Cold Immersion Efficacy and Reasons to Use:
Use: Getting ready for the next training session, especially in a camp situation (ie: you’re working aggressively towards a goal), is paramount.
I can say that when it comes to active recovery modalities (by that I mean things you are actively doing to enhance your ability to recover and perform at your next training session), the name of the game is relief and simply killing soreness. Soreness is anecdotally, the number one cited factor by most athletes at my gym as to why they’ve not stuck to their past strength and conditioning programs outside their sport.
Secondly, sore movers are poor movers. They avoid their natural range of motion if it’s impaired, arguably creating compensation and odd movements in the time they’re sore. At worst, they actually temporarily avoid moving through the right ROM at all. It’s when you’re not moving properly that you’re far more likely to injure yourself. By virtue of the poor movement patterns that extreme soreness creates alone, you could make the argument the training session is less effective in bringing you to your bigger goal.
But if you’re looking for an even more simple reason that relates to the one stated above: if you’re sore, your enjoyment and experience of training is just going to be less. For many recreational and amateur athletes, if it’s ultimately not fulfilling, you won’t do it anymore.
For that reason, it really benefits an athlete to do everything in their power to mitigate soreness. This would include cold immersion therapies.
Use: Positive Health Effects & Outcomes
The positive effects of a cold shower are well documented and touted by health experts that span disciplines. Wim Hof and interest in what he had to offer the world has also shined a large light on bringing increased attention to the positive effects of cold therapy for your health: including but not limited to increased immune and lymphatic system function that in one major study, resulted in a 29% decrease in missed days of work/school by participants.
Use: Effects on Combat Sports Performance
This will largely echo the first point, but given that many of my readers and clients are in this realm, it’s worth discussing specifically for combat sports.
Firstly, anything we say would be anecdotal, but backed peripherally by science. I am not aware of a study that pertains specifically to combat athletes, but I can share a great deal of anecdote (as I am sure many of you can as well).
Combat athletes tend to be some of the more open minded when it comes to training and recovery modalities, so it’s no surprise that the early days of public cryotherapy use came a great deal from the fighters who shined a light on it. Previous to that, the common use of cold therapy was obviously ice baths.
Most athletes and advocates will talk about cold baths helping with inflammation and also soreness. The inflammatory blunting mechanism of a cold bath would definitely be both anecdotally and scientifically backed, as the very mechanism that blunts inflammation in cold therapies is what ultimately may impact hypertrophy (more on that in the next section).
Because of this, it’s worth exploring cold therapies to get you through some rough training days.
Contraindications
There do seem to be some very clear contraindications (ie: times where use is not recommended) that have emerged in the use of cold therapy. These are mostly in the realm of hypertrophy training, or training for muscular size. There is also some precedent for training for strength and there being some detriments as well. We’ll explore both below.
Hypertrophy Detriments
This idea was first floated around a few years ago before we started getting early research done on the subject. The idea was that the body’s natural inflammatory process which promotes healing, must be allowed to run its course to some degree in order to promote maximum muscle growth. To blunt this process, would theoretically blunt hypertrophy. To what degree? We do not know.
Brad Schoenfeld offers a look at this and summarizes some of the early studies done on this in his landmark work “The Science and Development of Muscular Hypertrophy.” (1)
In it he discusses the studies that were done around cold therapies and does in fact conclude it may hinder hypertrophy due to a variety of mechanisms that blunt the inflammatory process. To what degree, we aren’t sure, but if your primary outcome in training is hypertrophy, you may want to shelve the cold therapy for a bit.
Strength Outcomes
I’m a little mixed here, as science is as well. The linked study indicates there’s precedence for decreased power output in isokinetic exercises in cold submerged limbs after 45 minutes of treatment. The linked study also concludes that it was only in isokinetic (constant tension) movements that saw the detriments, but not isometric or low velocity movements.
I’d welcome any other research done on the topic of strength and cold therapies, as a lot of the strength athletes I’ve talked to over the years welcome cold baths and hardly thought of it as something detrimental.
Matt Wenning, a former world record holder in powerlifting, has told me he used cold therapies on and off throughout his lifting career. Powerlifters and others may find that the possible “detriments” of cold therapy on their strength are far outweighed by the positive health effects and “readying” themselves for more training. And to that point, I’d agree.
Another point that ties back to the study is that they recognized that isometric strength was unaffected. Isometric contractions are considered the most forceful of contractions, but there is no movement in the measurement by nature (isometric implies static strength). If you’re applying this to sports, force is seldom applied isometrically only, however, isometric strength is all over the sport of jiu jitsu and grappling. A Rear Naked Choke may be one of the best examples. So if you take into consideration there is also seldom isokinetic movements in MMA or jiu jitsu, it’s easy to see why combat sports and cold therapy are really compatible.
This is really in the weeds, but a fun thing to ponder if you ask me.
Summary:
Cold therapy is excellent if you’re after:
Positive health outcomes.
A recovery modality in order to help you train during tough camps or prep periods
It’s more important in the end that you show up to your training session feeling ready to roar and do so in a way that makes you feel confident.
You may want to avoid cold therapies if:
Hypertrophy is your main goal.
If you’re in an “off season” and you’re looking to maximize adaptations through training, again, particularly in hypertrophy and possibly strength and power. In this case, you can increase your rest days without negatively impacting your training.