Hello and welcome to the Runers Connect audio blog on the Run to the Top Podcast. This is Coach Claire Bartholic and today I'm reading

The reason that you need to stop icing your running injuries right now, written by John Davis.

Icing. There's probably no injury treatment that's more ubiquitous.

At high school cross country meets, you'll see ice bags and ice cups littered everywhere.

At running stores, you'll find reusable ice packs and specially designed icing sleeves.

And if you ask your doctor what to do, specially designed icing sleeves.

And if you ask your doctor what to do about a running injury,

the response will almost invariably be ice it.

However, as researchers and coaches are starting to learn more about how

inflammation works, our understanding of how to treat injuries is changing.

In short, the research shows that some inflammation is a natural and good thing, so inhibiting

it actually hinders the healing process.

But what does the research say on icing? Is it the same effect as anti-inflammatory's?

Is icing useful in every situation? If so, what's the best way to go about it?

Icing and overuse running injuries.

Given the near ubiquitous recommendation to ice when injured,

you'd expect there to be reams of studies on such a universal injury treatment, but astoundingly there aren't.

There's a moderately sized collection of controlled experiments on using icing or cryotherapy as it's known in medical circles for acute injuries like ankle sprains and post surgery recovery, but research into icing for over-use injuries,

like the ones runners get, is quite limited.

Some papers mention cryotherapy as a treatment for tendon injuries, plantrophysitis, or shin splints.

But it's only in passing, there's been essentially no rigorous testing of icing as a treatment for running injuries.

Icing was used as a control treatment in a 2007 study on eccentric exercises for

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