February 18, 2024: Cold Therapy
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Exercise challenges your muscles, causing micro-tears. These micro-tears are necessary for muscle building, but they also result in soreness. This week, we’re going to talk about using some of the different forms of “cold therapy” to help you recover from aches and pains.
Cold treatments include anything from your basic ice packs, to ice baths, to the ever-growing trend of whole-body cryotherapy. If you’ve ever sprained an ankle or bumped your head, you know the first thing you’d reach for is an ice pack or frozen bag of peas. Cold therapy for pain has been around for a long time. A study in the International Journal of Sports discovered cold therapy helped reduce muscle pain in 80% of cases as well as aiding in recovery and performance in 71% of those studies. They also found injuries, like a sprained ankle, treated with an ice pack heals 3 days faster than one that wasn’t treated.
The cold reduces blood flow to the region, decreasing swelling and inflammation. In addition, it may also reduce your sensitivity to pain by numbing the region and delaying the pain signals being relayed from your nerves to your brain.
These days athletes take the ice pack method a step further by fully immersing themselves into an ice bath. An ice bath is usually a cool 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit. The recommendation is to submerge yourself for 11-15 minutes. This isn’t for everyone, but it can help if you have large muscle areas that need recovery help. While the cold may be intense, your body and your brain will eventually get used to it, and the cold will repair the muscles and prepare you for the next workout.
If you think an ice bath is cold, imagine being put into a chamber wearing next to nothing with just your head sticking out in -200 degrees Fahrenheit. Sounds crazy, right? Frankly, I agree! Athletes are taking it to the extreme with the next step in cold therapy, whole-body cryotherapy. You stand in the chamber for only 2-4 minutes while an intense cooling system shocks your body into survival mode producing “cold shock proteins.”
Believers in the chamber say these proteins create a spike in amino acids and other tissue-building hormones necessary in keeping your muscles from disintegrating. When being exposed to this cold you wind up with a surplus of these compounds making for a more efficient recovery. But, what works for one person may not work for another.
Next Sunday, we’ll talk about how you can use some simple methods to visualize your goals.
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I hope you have a wonderful week,
Kelly
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