Cold Water Immersion | Why I've Changed My Mind

Becoming married to your beliefs is a dangerous thing when you work in the health industry. Things we believe to be true can be proven false, and we all have to be willing to go back on things we once stood by/believed to offer the best information forward towards the public.

A few years ago I remember teammates asking about hot/cold showers and using contrast therapy. My thoughts were, "The research isn't really there. If you feel like it works, go for it, but I don't think in good practice I could recommend it". This is due to multiple studies showing that as a recovery modality, there was a lack of a mechanism and results were less than exciting. If the individual believed that it helped them, I wanted that "placebo effect" to do its work, however I would not be comfortable intentionally misleading anyone simply to hope for a placebo effect.

Recently there has been some really exciting research coming out about cold immersion therapies. While I'm still not likely to recommend this immediately post exercise due to a "blunting" effect of your physiological response, as a stand-alone training session cold water immersion seems really promising. I personally try to keep my cold water immersion a handful of hours separated from any of my other training to avoid any competition between the stimuli, however I'm uncertain of specific protocols on that. Currently I'm doing 3+ minute bouts 3-4 days per week. Protocols are bound to be finely tuned in the future, but for now I'll start with simply modeling the research data and adapting it to myself as time passes!

[seandoherty]

Very Impressive! And thanks for explaining the process.

[reid]

Love your inclusion of academic papers man! Good stuff and totally agree with you.

Have you ever thought about doing a breath holding series? Saw your video about 3min PR, and would cool to see a weekly progression to 4 or 5 minutes or something