Ice baths have become increasingly popular, both as part of Instagram-worthy health regimens, and, most relevant to this article, as a potential aid to improving recovery from exercise.
However, the research on ice baths improving recovery isn’t as conclusive as this popularity might suggest.
At first glance, they seem to work, in that multiple studies have shown decreased soreness in the day following exercise when ice baths are used soon after the exercise session.
It’s not clear what exactly causes this decrease in soreness, but the main proposed mechanism is the reduction in inflammation that comes as a result of the constriction of the blood vessels.
In theory, this reduction in soreness could mean better performance in subsequent training sessions, more high quality training accrued over time, and improved training adaptations as a result.
It’s important to point out, however, that it’s not clear whether or not ice baths reduce soreness any more than other active or passive recovery methods that athletes might consider.
This is important because if it turns out that a warm bath or a short stretching session has the same impact, there are many who would prefer those options to suffering through an ice bath.
Even if we accept ice baths are a suitable method of reducing soreness, more recent research has shown another side to ice baths, in that their use after hypertrophy and strength training has been shown to lead to less muscle and strength gain than when ice baths were not used.
In a similar vein, research has also shown post-exercise ice baths to decrease the muscle protein synthesis (MPS)* response to the prior training session.
(*MPS is a term that basically means the formation or recovery of muscle tissue, usually seen in response to training and/or protein intake.)
The MPS response to training is partially dependent on the inflammatory response to exercise, so by decreasing inflammation via ice baths, we may actually be decreasing the body’s allocation of resources towards muscular recovery.
You could say, to oversimplify it, that by using external means to reduce the perceived training stress, you’re telling the body it doesn’t need to recover as much.
These potential pros and cons pose a few questions when considering whether or not you should be using ice baths after your training sessions as a means of improving recovery.
Recovery versus adaptation
Firstly, it looks like there may be a tradeoff between short-term recovery and long-term adaptation.
This is, we may feel better the day after a training session in terms of soreness, but may not have gotten the full benefit of that session.
For now, we can only confidently assert this when talking about the goals of muscle gain and strength gain, as opposed to general sport or aerobic exercise.
However the negative impact on MPS would suggest a general negative effect on any activity where muscular adaptations are driving progress, which is true to more or lesser extent in most sports and athletic activities.
Either way, if ice baths reduce the adaptation from a training session, and we multiply that across months and years, the cumulative loss of progress could be substantial.
On the flip side, if that increased recovery leads to the ability to do more training, the extra training volume accumulated may make up for some of this loss.
That may be more appropriate in cases where more volume is deemed important for the adaptations desired.
For example, this may be the case in activities that rely on skill acquisition more than muscular adaptations, where more frequency might lead to more improvement.
It’s also important to remember that there are times of year or sporting season where recovering quickly is more important than getting the full adaptation of the training or competitive events.
For example, this may be the case where someone has two football matches in the space of 3 days, where they will likely care more about feeling fresh in the second match than they will about how much fitness they gained from the first one.
Recovery versus reduced soreness
Even if we accept that there may be times where ice baths are more appropriate than others, it’s important to define what we mean by recovery.
For example, most of the research showing recovery benefits of ice baths uses soreness as their measure of recovery.
And whilst this may be a measure for an individual's perceived level of recovery, it probably isn’t a perfect measure of actual recovery as the muscular level.
In fact, if the previously-mentioned reduction in MPS is significant, then it would suggest that muscular recovery could actually be reduced by using ice baths post-session.
Whilst neither of these (soreness or MPS) are exact measures of recovery, we can at least say, especially given the decreases in hypertrophy and strength adaptations, that it’s not clear whether or not ice baths actually improve the type of recovery we care most about when considering ongoing athletic performance.
To expand on that, if it turns out that post-exercise ice baths decrease soreness, but also decrease muscular recovery, in theory, that could increase injury risk, given you’d no longer have the muscular pain that would usually hold you back from over-exerting under-recovered muscles.
Local Recovery versus General recovery
Another aspect to consider is that there are other aspects of recovery beyond soreness and muscular recovery.
For example, whilst some people feel that the initial shock of getting into cold water is followed by a feeling of relaxation as their body gets used to it, others perceive the whole experience, before, during, and after, as completely stressful.
What we tend to see with effective recovery methods is that they are perceived as relaxing, leading the body’s parasympathetic system (the “rest and digest” system) up-regulating, promoting recovery processes in the body as a result.
For those who are able to get to that relaxed state during, and feel great after, ice baths, it could be fair to say they’re more likely to be promoting recovery.
But if leading up the ice bath, the person is dreading it, is in a stressed state during it, and comes out of it in a terrible mood, it could have the complete opposite effect.
In this case, rather than improving recovery, it could contributing to the already existing allostatic load (the cumulative stress on the body), leading to either decreased whole-body recovery or increased requirements for recovery.
A hot bath or a massage (or even nothing at all) would probably have done this person more good.
Other potential effects of Ice Baths
Up to this point, we’ve only addressed the idea of using ice baths straight after exercise sessions as a means of recovery.
That’s been on purpose, given it’s the topic of the article, and the most common use athletes will have for ice baths.
But it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t the only reason people might want to use ice baths.
For example, some people use them to get them amped up in the morning for the day ahead.
Indeed, using ice baths has been shown to increase dopamine levels in the following hours, theoretically (and anecdotally) leading to better mood, more productivity, etc.
Others claim to use it to practice mental toughness and resilience.
The idea here is that the cold shock imposes an automatic stressful state on the body, and you get the chance to practice regaining voluntary control of that.
Others will use them purposely as a stressor to induce potential benefits on the cardiovascular system.
There may also be the obvious case of spending more time in cold water improving one’s ability to withstand the stress of cold water, both physiologically and psychologically.
With any of these goals however, it is important to view those sessions as additional stressors and time commitments.
This may be worth it if we can recover and adapt from them, and if they’re actually providing the benefits relevant to our goals, but as with any addition to our current regimen, it’s important to consider if there are other, more beneficial and relevant activities we could be doing.
It’s also important to reiterate that whilst the research on post-exercise recovery and ice baths is not sufficient to make any concrete conclusions, the effects of different temperatures, time spent in the baths, time passed since training, and what type of exercise (e.g. strength versus cardiovascular) are even less studied.
With all this said, should you use ice baths after training for recovery?
For me, it comes down to a few things.
The first consideration is whether or not you perceive them to be beneficial, or dare I say, enjoy them.
If not, I see no reason to suffer through them, when other effective recovery strategies are available.
If you do perceive benefits and/or enjoy them, the second consideration is whether the reduction in short-term recovery (or more specifically, soreness) is worth a potential trade-off in adaptation.
This will likely vary based on your goals, the time of the sporting season, and may be specific to periods of condensed training or competing.
A third consideration is the type of training you’re doing.
The reduced adaptations have generally been shown in strength and hypertrophy training, as opposed to general sport or even specific aerobic based sports.
Further research will hopefully make this clearer, but for now, it’s sufficient to say that there will likely be a decrease in muscle gain and perhaps strength, with other areas being less clear.
A fourth consideration is whether or not you’re doing it for the recovery benefits or the other benefits.
If you’re doing it for other benefits, it may be better to categorise them as an additional stressor, given that the adaptations will come as a result of the demands placed on the body, and will therefore likely contribute to the total stress (or allostatic load) placed on the body.
It’s also worth considering any future studies and their findings, especially given that this is far from a settled topic.
Finally, it would be remiss to go without saying that even if the purported benefits of ice baths were fully warranted, optimal recovery will still require adequate focus on managing training load, sufficient rest and sleep, appropriate nutrition, and other important factors.
Article Written By Conor O’Neill
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