In the last decade, Coldwater immersion has emerged as one of the most popular post-exercise

recovery strategies utilized among athletes during training and competition.

This primarily stems from the belief that cold water immersion facilitates

aspects of recovery and regeneration, thereby conferring a potential training and performance

advantage. But is it a friend, foe, or just futile? The cold truth is that local cryotherapy, meaning like an ice pack, does not appear

to diminish soreness or accelerate the recovery strength. Local cryotherapy does not seem

to contribute to the improvement of delayed onset muscle soreness or muscle weakness associated

with exercise-induced muscle damage.

But what about cold plunges?

If you look at the largest systematic review in meta-analysis of the effects of cold plunges

on the recovery of physical performance, compiling the results of more than five dozen randomized controlled

or crossover studies, after

cold water immersion, people felt less sore after a workout, at one hour later, six hours

later, one day, two days, and three days later, but not after four days.

They also felt less fatigued, particularly in the hour or hours immediately

afterwards, and after three days they reported feeling more recovered than those who hadn't

done the cold plunges, but were they actually more recovered using objective measures?

Endurance was significantly improved an hour later,

but not after that jump performance was impaired six hours after the cold plunge, but was

significantly improved 24 hours later. Allow me a quick tangent on heterogeneity.

See this i squared column?

This is something I don't talk about enough.

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