How do ice baths work




















Cool water say, 60 to 75 degrees can still be beneficial—as can active recovery very light exercise to facilitate blood flow to musculature. Seek to simplify. Building a personal ice bath daily can be a daunting task. Look for a gym that has a cold plunge, or if you live close to a river, lake or the ocean, keep tabs on the current water temperature.

Rush to take a warm shower immediately after the ice bath. The residual cooling effect and gradual warming are ideal. But DO take the shower if you are unable to warm yourself. How to Decrease Injuries with Mobility Exercises. More Triathlon Articles. Look for this banner for recommended activities.

Cancel Yes. Join Active or Sign In. All rights reserved. Go Premium. Need Help? Learn More Customer Login. How It Works 2 of Do's and Don'ts for Icing an Injury. Find: Your Next Race.

DO 3 of DO 4 of In the four decades since Mirkin first promoted RICE for sports injuries, icing has become standard advice for people suffering sprained joints, sore shoulders, and other orthopedic aches or injuries. One attraction is that icing is cheap and easy. With a few bags of ice and a bathtub or even a garbage can, any athlete can make a low-budget ice bath in a matter of minutes.

Icing aficionados can be found in nearly every sport. Marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe helped popularize cold treatments among runners by attributing some of her success to the ice baths that became her habit. Surfer Kelly Slater is also a fan. In the summer of , an ESPN reporter tried some immersive journalism by interviewing Washington Redskins defensive lineman Chris Baker while the two sat in adjacent plastic tubs of ice water. And at one recent summer training session, ten Newcastle United soccer players were photographed crowded into a single inflatable kiddie pool filled with ice water.

Even rock stars use ice baths. Madonna told Rolling Stone magazine that after her performances, which usually include hours of dancing, often in high-heeled shoes, she likes to take a ten-minute ice bath to recover. That sense of triumph is earned—an ice bath hurts. Instead, you have to plunge in and submerge yourself before you have a chance to change your mind. Toes throb and sting. Feet ache. Large muscles, like your calves and quads, tingle and burn, and if you have genitals that dip into the icy water, they might try to rush back up the inguinal canal.

All this agony feeds into a culture of sport that idolizes grit and assumes that pain equates to gain. The fact that icing feels so excruciating almost surely adds to whatever effectiveness the technique might have. Scientists call this an active placebo effect—our natural inclination to believe that if a treatment is painful, it must be very effective. If it hurts, you assume it must be working, and this can influence your assessment of how much it helped. The rationale behind recovery ice baths and cold tubs goes something like this: the cold stimulates your sympathetic nerve fibers, which react by signaling blood vessels in the area to constrict and send blood back to your core to protect your vital organs.

The pressure of the water may also provide some compression against your muscles and blood vessels, which could also slow swelling and inflammation. Finally, icing relieves pain by numbing sore areas, at least temporarily. That icing might suppress inflammation was originally a selling point.

But in recent years, Mirkin, popularizer of the RICE method, has come to think of this as a bug, not a feature. In a complete turnabout, he now denounces the icing methods he once championed. Home football game on Saturday. Review gameday parking and traffic info for hospital patients and visitors.

Masks are required in all our health care locations. View current visitor policy. Author: Chris Kolba, PT. After a long hard workout or practice, nothing feels better than submerging your sore body in an ice bath to help soothe the pain. This toe-numbing experience is a technique many athletes use, but the research on the effectiveness of ice baths is mixed. Is it worth the goosebumps? This muscle damage will stimulate muscle cell activity and help in the repair and strengthening of the muscle.

This is also thought to be the explanation for the delayed onset of pain and soreness, which often presents 12—72 hours after exercise.

The ice bath and the compression from the water pressure cause constriction of blood vessels. This has been suggested as a mechanism that helps with the flushing of waste products, such as lactic acid, and reducing fluid accumulation from the affected tissue. The cold temperature will also reduce swelling and tissue breakdown. Ice water immersion is also said to be able to shift lactic acid.

Upon getting out of ice bath, the tissues and your body will begin to warm up, which causes an increase in circulation, which can assist in moving fluid and a relaxation of muscles in general.



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