Published on November 24, 2015
Learn how Ice Baths or “Cold Water Therapy” can be beneficial for recovery. This cheap and easy recovery method will not only reduce swelling and inflammation in the body but it will also help flush harmful metabolic debris out of your muscles.
If you are a person who regularly lifts weights I’m sure you are all too familiar with Muscle Soreness; more specifically, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness or DOMS. DOMS occurs 24 to 48 hours after weight training. Muscle soreness is nothing to worry about as it is a symptom of exercise-induced micro trauma. This article was created to help you minimize this side effect by explaining how you can use ice baths for faster recovery.
Believe it or not, lifting weight is actually micro-trauma to your muscles.
Weight training is a form of stress that you purposely put your body through in order to create a response. Your body recovers from this stress by growing bigger and stronger. The key is to manage this stress just like any other form of stress in your life. If you were to completely avoid this stress by not lifting weights at all you would not have anything to recover from i.e. you would not get stronger. So, realize that weight training is a good stress.
With that said, muscle soreness can hinder your progress if it frequently affects your ability to train.
Many people don’t realize that being in the gym and lifting weights is not when your body is getting bigger and stronger; quite the opposite. You are actually breaking your body down in the gym. You grow bigger and stronger during your RECOVERY TIME!
Your ability to recover will have a dramatic impact on your progress in the gym. Sometimes it’s not necessarily about what you aren’t doing in the gym it’s what you aren’t doing outside of the gym.
Ice Baths For Faster Recovery
Ice baths or “cold water therapy” can speed up recovery allowing you to train more often and/or improving the quality of your training sessions.
- Submerging yourself in cold water constricts your blood vessels and decreases metabolic activity, which reduces swelling and inflammation in the body.
- Once you get out of the cold water blood rapidly pumps back to the tissues, increasing oxygen and nutrient supply to injured and inflamed tissues, allowing them to heal faster.
- Studies have shown that Ice Baths not only reduce swelling and inflammation in the body but they also help flush harmful metabolic debris out of your muscles.
This is the same concept as icing a muscle tear or a sprained ankle. Reducing swelling and inflammation will allow the injury to heal faster. Ice Baths are a method used to treat the entire body rather than a localized ice pack.
Ice Baths: “How To”
- Find a cold body of water with a temperature of 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit is perfect. Spending an extended period of time in water colder than 50 degrees Fahrenheit may be dangerous. Please do not take an ice bath in a frozen lake! Colder is not always better.
- Spend 6-10 minutes in the water. Time will vary for all individuals based on bodyweight, body composition, and mental toughness! Again, spending too much time in cold water can be dangerous. More time is not always better.
- Keep moving! Standing still will heat up the water immediately surrounding your body. Constantly moving will ensure the water is circulating. Some athletes encourage light activity during Ice Baths such as treading water or slowly swimming laps.
- Once you get out of the water do not spend anytime hanging around outside. Get inside, put some warm clothes on, and drink a warm beverage. Allow your body to naturally warm itself itself up.
Cold Water Therapy Options
- You can jump into any large body of cold water; a pool during the winter, a lake, a pond, a river.
- You can add ice and water to a bath tub but this is not my favorite option because ice costs money and I can only ice my lower body in a normal size bathtub. A large body of water allows me to submerge up to my neck providing therapy to my lower back, spine, shoulder, elbows, wrists, and hands.
- You can also take a cold shower but in my opinion the difference between a cold shower and a cold water plunge is comparable to a foo-foo massage and a deep tissue massage!
I hope this article shed some light on the importance of recovery and educated you on the benefit of using Ice Baths for recovery. Thanks for reading and if you haven’t already be sure to check out the video!
Train Untamed!
