Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Ice baths aren’t the cool way to recover
When most people exercise they take pains to warm up and cool down. We can actually feel the benefit of doing some warm-up exercises, but what about the cool down? The benefits aren’t so easy to measure and we take them for granted. Especially when we hear that the likes of Andy Murray climbs into an ice bath to ease aching muscles. Got to be good for you, hasn’t it? Slipping into a bathtub filled with freezing water after a hard workout has long been routine for many athletes, who believe that the chilly temperatures will reduce inflammation in their tired muscles and help their bodies to physiologically recover more quickly from strenuous exercise. But a new study finds otherwise. Scientists from Queensland University of Technology in Australia and others asked a group of healthy young men to twice complete a gruelling lower-body weight workout, using only one leg. This was so that the exercised leg could be compared to the non-exercised limb. After one of these sessions, the men eased themselves into a bathtub filled with water cooled to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees C) and lay there for 10 minutes. After the second session they slowly pedalled an exercise bike, also for 10 minutes, a light activity that mimics how athletes who do not choose to flash-freeze their limbs might cool down. During each session, the scientists took samples of blood and muscle tissue from the athletes before and soon after their cool-downs and again 24 and 48 hours later. They then examined them for evidence of inflammation and changes in the activity of certain genes that can cause muscle soreness. If the cold bath was working as athletes hoped, the scientists reasoned there would be fewer markers of inflammation and potential soreness in their working muscles after the ice bath than after the gentle pedalling. But, Jonathan Peake, of Queensland University of Technology who led the study, found there were not. The number of cells associated with inflammation was much higher in the men’s exercised legs compared to their unused legs after each workout. But those numbers weren’t significantly lower after the chilly bath than after the pedalling, either immediately or two days later. The scientists didn’t ask the men how their legs felt or objectively measured whether they could return to strenuous exercise sooner after the ice baths. But the cellular evidence suggests that a cold bath may do little for heavily exercised muscles except chill them.