If you scroll through social media you will see a lot of people preaching the effects of ice baths or hot/cold contrast being extremely effective for their recovery and allowing them to recover fast and train harder. Now I am not one to dismiss anecdotal evidence but I always like to see what the science has to say about these things. Also never fall victim to if it is on my favorite lifters IG it must be good because we all know that is a lie. You can't really put a study on it feels good when I do it so I will keep doing it and if that is the case good for you but if the ultimate goal is to be at your best why not see what the literature has to say and maybe find more effective ways to spend your time.
The other question you have to ask yourself about recovery modalities is are they necessary? Do I want to blunt the adaptation process or is it a good thing to not be fully recovered and there is a time and a place for recovery which I will be written a full article on next month but for now lets just say it is probably always better for you to save your recovery modalities for closer to a meet when you may really need it.
In this study which can be found here
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31008862
they used cold water immersion, hot water immersion, thermoneutral water immersion, and contrast water immersion. They used physically active men for the study and each group was immersed underwater in a sitting position to the level of the xiphoid process for 10 minutes. They did performance tests of 30m sprints, isometric leg press, and countermovement jumps, followed by blood samples, followed by a 10min cycling cool down and finished with their selected recovery method. Followed by more blood test 40mins, 60mins, 24hrs, 48hrs, and 72hrs post-exercise.
The main finding like I discussed earlier was that the groups who did contrast and cold water immersion had a higher perceived feeling of self-relaxation. Besides that, there was no significant difference in any of the other measures that actually determine recovery. This tells me that immersion therapy may be useful for something like 2 a days or back to back matches just to feel better but the actual recovery benefits are not there.
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