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Study Says Ice Baths Do Not Work

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Did you see this report on ice baths last week?

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth have found cold water immersion is no more and no less effective in helping an athlete recover after sport than light cool-down exercise.

As for why previous studies showed signs of efficacy they speculate that:

It might be that previous studies have used as a control group athletes who do nothing to warm down versus those who are immersed in cold water.

[…] We found athletes who cooled down using light exercise recovered at the same rate as those in cold water.

They also mention that ice baths pose serious health risks, but they don’t mention what these risks are.

As is unfortunately typical with science reporting, they didn’t link to the study. You can’t access it freely, but here is the abstract.

Just to add a picture to this post, here is Professor Louis Sugarman a.k.a. “the human polar bear”, who in the 1890s, brought that practice to the United States.

Prof Sugarman Ice Bath

About Gregor Winter

Hi, I run ATG.

Follow me on instagram @gregorwinter (and ATG @atginsta).

Comments

  1. Daniel Jørgensen says

    As far as I know there’s many different studies on ice bathing but all state different points.

    But what are criteria for success of the recovery? ANd what kind of work are we talking?

    I believe many of the diverse results are dues to differences in these….

  2. Simon Klimesh says

    Ice baths can help with pain control. Athletes sacrifice their bodies daily, being numb for an amount of time can be great. I say do what ever you have to in order to get in that comfort zone so you can relax outside of training.

    • Angie "Beastess" says

      I agree. I don’t so much use it for inflammation or recovery. I use it as a pain/discomfort management tool. After some hard training cycles nothing feels better than numbing out from about the waist down.

    • Kpapangelis says

      Cause not all studies (to be honest a very low percentage of American studies goes there) go on PubMed. This is from a European University, so most like is getting indexed by web of science, scopus, etc.