Icing Your Arm VS Ice Baths
We are going to keep this one short and to the point. Ice is just a tool and there can be various rationales for using it or hating it.
Spoiler Alert: Love Total Body Cold Water Immersion, Hate Local application of Ice
In the end, it is important to identify WHY you want to use ice.
You can usually divide the use of Ice into 2 Categories:
Local Ice
Global Cold Immersion
Local Ice
Unless you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you have heard a ton of professionals screaming to avoid icing your arm. It has been widely agreed upon that this is usually working against our goals of promoting healing and decreasing soreness. This is due to a few factors. First, the application of the ice pack causes a local vasoconstriction which not only slows down how quickly the waste products can leave the area but also decreases blood flow (containing nutrients) to the area. A third reason would be that ice slows down the lymphatic system which is the other system that the body uses to evacuate waste products. There are certain acute injuries where this would be an accepted use.
Global Cold Immersion
If you think about global icing using the same physiological rationale as the Local example, it seems idiotic and would leave you wondering why on earth would somebody jump in a cold tub for all the negative reasons listed above.
The Answer:
Total body cold immersion is playing a completely different game. Its goal is to affect the controller of all of the systems, the nervous system. Your Nervous System has two autonomic aspects: Sympathetic (Fight or Flight) and Parasympathetic (Rest and Digest). When we are in a more parasympathetic state, we recover much more effectively as it is the body’s primary goal in that state. Anxious and Stressed out people live in a more Sympathetic State. There is some research out the showing acute activation of the Vagus Nerve which is the primary Parasympathetic Nerve. That’s great!
However, we LOVE the chronic benefits of Cold water immersion. Here a basic version of how it affects the body’s response over time.
Every time the body experiences a strong enough stress stimulus, the Sympathetic system is activated
Total Body Cold Immersion is a very strong stress stimulus as it used to be a life or death situation
When you first start “cold tubbing”, you will experience strong Sympathetic responses as you feel you respiratory rate and heart rate speed up and possibly even shivering.
Over time, your body sees that this is not a huge threat and the amount of stressor needed before you go into fight or flight mode is increased
This has a very calming and stress relieving outcome over time
We believe this can be HUGE for the athletes that struggle shutting down or turning to brain off at night, especially after a adrenaline filled night game
We can’t say we have seen research showing whether this increased tolerance to stress is specific to the stimulus of cold water or across all areas of life. Subjectively speaking, we have seen big improvements in stress control, sleep, and down regulation since incorporating this daily.
Full Transparency: This was a pretty biased article but we feel strongly about it. Maybe more future research will come out supporting it as well.
**We also used to be part of the Anti-Ice Crowd
As with everything else, try it out and see if it is a good fit for you.
