Are Ice Baths Hurting Your Recovery?
There’s not much that makes you look tougher than plunging yourself into a bath of ice. It’s what many people do after workouts or after they hurt themselves in the hopes of reducing pain and improving recovery.
However, as with most things in fitness there are some important nuances to understand. The truth is ice baths make sense for some people, but for others they aren’t such a good idea. The goal if this article is to help you understand when ice baths are helpful to implement, and therefore understand if you should be doing them yourselves.
What does an ice bath do?
The goal of an ice bath is to improve recovery time and make you able to train again in less time. The mechanism by which it does this is by reducing inflammation to the body. This same idea also applies for any type of cold exposure, not just an ice bath.
When we exercise, we create localized inflammation to the muscles that performed the work. Much of the pain we experience from being sore post exercise is from this inflammation, which is why ice baths can eliminate the feeling of being sore sooner. Further, a general indicator that a muscle is ready to train again is why this inflammation subsides; so, it makes sense why people would see ice baths as being a generally helpful tool.
Now, let’s talk about some of the nuances on if this is a phenomenon that would be helpful to you or could possibly be holding you back.
Ice baths for hypertrophy (muscle growth) and strength training
As we said, exercise induces localized inflammation to the muscles that performed the work. For example, if you did a bunch of sets of biceps curls in a workout, your biceps will be inflamed for a few days afterwards. Ice baths reduce inflammation in the body, and therefore would reduce inflammation and soreness in your biceps.
However, this might not be a good thing if your goal is to build muscle or strength. The reason why is that inflammation is an important component to the process of building back new muscle after being damaged from a workout.
If we did an ice bath after this workout, we would reduce the inflammation in our biceps, but we would also reduce the muscle growth and strength gain from that workout. Which, of course, is not very helpful when you are trying to build muscle.
What’s important to understand here is this: you should not confuse not being sore anymore with optimal recovery. Just because your biceps lost the feeling of being sore sooner does not mean it’s the most productive thing for you to be doing.
Ice baths for endurance training
Similar to resistance training, such as weight training, training for endurance likely will produce some degree of muscle damage, and therefore inflammation. Even if you did your long run at a very slow pace where you never exerted yourself too much, odds are your legs would feel a bit toasted after.
We said before that ice baths can be counter-productive for growing muscle because the inflammation was an important component to building back more muscle. If endurance training also produces inflammation, does this mean ice baths are also bad in this instance?
Conversely, ice baths may be to your favor. When trying to improve your endurance, what you are really doing is training your heart and not necessarily your muscles. There are ways that your muscles adapt to cardio, however it is not in the sense of muscle growth.
The adaptations that your heart makes are less dependent on the presence of inflammation to occur. As a result, if an ice bath can help you to train again sooner, then it can be an advantageous if you are an endurance athlete.
Related: How Cardio Affects Your Body
Ice baths for athletes
When I say “athletes” I am referring to field or court athletes: such as football players, soccer players, basketball players, etc. This type of individual has very different goals depending on what time of year they are in.
For example, in the off season is really when they do most of their improvements physically in terms of strength, power, endurance, etc. Often, there are blocks in this period where there is a focus on improving one variable at a time (strength, endurance, etc.). In an endurance block, ice baths can make sense since you are likely only focusing on maintaining muscle mass. In a strength block, however, ice baths would likely not make sense to do as they can inhibit muscle growth.
Basically, it’s very context dependent on the current training block of the athlete, the type of athlete, etc. For the most part, it probably makes more sense to utilize other recovery methods aside from ice baths to avoid any confusion.
When an athlete is in-season, ice baths can be a helpful tool in the tool box. Even though they might potentially limit further physical progress, they won’t cause you to lose any muscle or strength- and they can make you ready to perform again sooner. If you are at a point where you need to play multiple games in close proximity to each other, an ice bath can be of great use to expedite that post-game tired feeling.
Related: 3 Tips for Balancing Strength and Endurance Training
Conclusion
As a summary, here’s the take-home I want you to have from this:
1. For building muscle or strength, ice baths are not a good idea
2. For improving endurance, ice baths can be beneficial
3. For field athletes, court athletes, hybrid athletes, etc. ice baths can help but it greatly depends
References
Is the ice bath finally melting? Cold water immersion is no greater than active recovery upon local and systemic inflammatory cellular stress in humans
PubMed ID: 27991663
The effects of cold water immersion and active recovery on inflammation and cell stress responses in human skeletal muscle after resistance exercise
PubMed ID: 27704555
An Evidence-Based Approach for Choosing Post-exercise Recovery Techniques to Reduce Markers of Muscle Damage, Soreness, Fatigue, and Inflammation: A Systematic Review With Meta-Analysis
PubMed ID: 29755363
Cold-water immersion (cryotherapy) for preventing and treating muscle soreness after exercise
PubMed ID: 22336838
Post-exercise Cold Water Immersion Effects on Physiological Adaptations to Resistance Training and the Underlying Mechanisms in Skeletal Muscle: A Narrative Review
PubMed ID: 33898988
The Influence of Post-Exercise Cold-Water Immersion on Adaptive Responses to Exercise: A Review of the Literature
PubMed ID: 29627884
Effect of the Depth of Cold Water Immersion on Sleep Architecture and Recovery Among Well-Trained Male Endurance Runners
PubMed ID: 33870188
Strength Training Adaptations After Cold-Water Immersion
Find it here
Effect of Cold-Water Immersion on Elbow Flexors Muscle Thickness After Resistance Training
Find it here
