Great Inventions of Cycling 2005: The ice bath
The ice bath is a recovery aid and is rather simple in concept. You sit in an ice bath. The idea is that the cold reduces postexercise inflammation in the muscles, which reduces post-training damage and means you can train again harder and/or sooner than otherwise.
The other noble purpose it serves is to take the one remaining bit of a serious athlete’s day that is still a straightforward pleasure – the hour or two after training when you can relax with the satisfaction of a job well done – and ruin it.
It also serves as an excellent means of determining just how off-the-rails obsessive an athlete is about pursuing every last performance benefit. If they’ll sit in a bath full of ice for 20 minutes wearing nothing but a much-too-littlemuch-too-late woolly hat, you can take it that they’ll try just about anything.
It’s a great photo opportunity, especially when travelling athletes have to improvise.
I have happy memories of tipping a photographer off about a wheelie bin ice bath a team-mate had set up in the car park of a hotel. It wasn’t even a particularly clean wheelie bin.
As an intervention there are serious doubts about its effectiveness – while it might help with something like recovery mid stage-race, it doesn’t seem to actually improve performance overall.
Which is why someone improved it with a more recent innovation, that of making athletes alternate between an ice bath and a hot bath. This ensures that they have to endure the worst bit, getting in when you’re nice and warm, as many times as possible.