Ice bath recovery, the truth.

Alright Guys, How’s it going?

So after a few years of cold showers after hard training, I decided today to finally do my research on whether ‘Ice Baths’ are actually doing me any good (about time really). My definition of an ice bath would be applying ice or cold water (less than 10 degrees Celsius) to an area such as tired cycling legs for 5min+. Here are the facts:

• MUSCLE DAMAGE; Ice baths do not repair muscle damage, scientific research shows that the levels of creatine kinase in blood (classic marker for muscle damage) were unchanged after ice bath treatment.
• INFLAMMATION; ice baths were shown to reduce the amount of inflammation in the subjects muscles.
• SORENESS; subjects perception of muscle soreness was reduced after ice bath treatment.(the theory is that it causes blood vessel restriction that flushes out most of the lactic acid)

So in SUMMARY:

Inflammation is an important part of your bodies coping method to dealing with stress and with hard training it plays an important role in your body’s ADAPTION to hard training. Reducing the inflammation, can hinder your body’s natural adaption process to hard training and thus hinder your improving performance.
However, the ice baths did reduce inflammation and perception of soreness, in essence speeding up recovery.
SO (this is the current advice that the English Institute of Sport is using):

DO NOT use ice baths during serious training, it will hinder your improvements. Use the methods described in my first post to aid recovery.
DO use ice baths during recovery weeks, in the weeks before races and during tapering weeks and of course in competition (multi event competition) for speedy recovery.

Hope that helped clear things up.