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Ice Bath Therapy
Can cryotherapy really relieve pain and heal muscles faster?

Long distance running can really stress your muscles. Like any intense exercise, it causes micro trauma or tiny tears in the muscle fibers. Those tears can take 2 or 3 days before they mend. The longer you have to wait for your body to heal, the longer it is before you can get another workout in. That's why athletes are always looking for ways to speed up the recovery process.

Quicker recovery + more workouts = more muscles faster.

One of the tricks long distance runners use for quicker recovery is an ice bath. It seems you can speed healing by dropping your legs into freezing cold water.

Ice baths (or cryotherapy as it's technically called) are believed to help in three ways. The ice reduces inflammation, swelling and tissue breakdown. It's thought that as the blood vessels constrict from the cold, they push waste products like lactic acid out. When you get out and start warming your legs up again, the body rushes warm blood back into the affected areas, which then heal faster.

Here's how to take an ice bath for the best results.

1. Start by filling a tub with cool water until it would reach just slightly below your waist.
2. Put on a sweatshirt or warm jacket, hat and neoprene booties. Only your legs have to be chilled so keep the rest of your body warm.
3. I like to have some music playing and a good book to take my mind off the cold.
4. Once you're ready, climb into the tub and pour 1 or 2 bags of ice in the water with you. It's going to get cold quick!

The water temperature should range between 50 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit (5 and 10 degrees Celsius). If it's much hotter than 60 degrees Fahrenheit it won't reduce the muscle inflammation. You don't want to sit in a tub of solid ice either, that would be too cold and very uncomfortable.

The exact length time you should chill has never been established. Runners websites and magazines usually say 15-20 minutes, but in tests the subjects only stayed for 5-15 minutes. I suggest you set a kitchen timer for 5 minutes and see how you feel when it goes off. If your legs aren't feeling numb or distress from the cold, go ahead and stay for up to 5 more.

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Taking an ice bath gives the most benefit when you do it as soon as the event is over. That can be a problem if you're in a race or far away from your home when you finish. Something you can try is look for a cold body of water, a river or lake at the end of the race and use that in place of an ice bath. Of course that won't work very well in the warm waters of my home Key West, but in northern states it's a reasonable alternative. Be sure to bring along plenty of towels and a change of clothing before you jump in.

There is one thing ice therapy is promoted for that it does NOT seem to help, Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). DOMS results from the way your muscles repair themselves. Your body rushes immune cells in to repair torn muscle tissue. Those immune cells make pain receptors in your body more sensitive and mediate the inflammatory response. In two separate studies an ice bath did nothing to lessen the pain. In fact, in an experiment reported in the 2007 British Journal of Sports Medicine, pain levels were higher for subjects who went through cryotherapy than for those who didn't.

If you're a runner, and you would like to experience less swelling or inflammation in your legs, or are trying to recover quicker after a particularly intense workout, taking a bath with a bunch of ice may be the way to go. But if you're looking for a way to reduce post workout pain, you'll have to try something else.

Ready to change your body? Don't wait a minute longer. Call TODAY for your free consultation! (305) 296-3434 CAUTION: Before beginning any diet or exercise program it's important to check with your doctor or health care professional first.

5/24/2009

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