Cooling Therapies For Recovery
Welcome to the latest issue of The Football Scientist.
In this week's issue, I'm going to provide best practice advice for using cooling therapies for exercise recovery based on our recent BASES Expert Statement.
Enjoy!
Why should you use cooling therapies?
The use of cooling therapies, such as ice baths, has been around for centuries for both general health and exercise recovery.
Following exercise, we experience both a primary and secondary damage response. Although not much can be done to prevent primary damage, it is the secondary damage phase in which cooling therapies can be useful.
The most common methods of cooling therapies include: cold water immersion (ice baths), whole or partial body cryotherapy and ice application (including newer methods such as phase change materials). The image below highlights the proposed effects of such methods on recovery:
Practical Factors to Consider
When selecting which cooling therapy is most appropriate, we need to take into consideration 3 factors: 1. Budget 2. Practicality 3. Athlete Adherence If we take whole body cryotherapy (WBC) as an example, often players report preferring this method due to the short duration (~3 mins) and dry application compared to other cooling methods. This means athlete adherence is enhanced. However, the cost of WBC can be very high to both purchase a chamber and also the associated costs to upkeep.
They also have limited portability in terms of moving between venues, such as away fixtures. Whereas ice baths are budget friendly (can use a simple wheelie bin, cold water and ice approach), and easily portable in different venues. However, some players hate cold water and refuse to do them. Therefore, it's a case of understanding what is the best 'all rounder' based on these 3 factors when using cooling methods with your individual players.
What are the best practice methods?
We recently published a survey paper that asked practitioners about their perceptions of using ice baths for recovery. Interestingly, we found a large variation in how practitioners firstly perceived its importance but also the protocols used in practice.
Based on the current research evidence, below are the guidelines when using different cooling methods. Practical factors may prevent 100% adoption of these guidelines, but where we can we should aim for these approaches:
Ice baths = 8-2 mins (ideally as a single bout), temperature between 8-12 °C
Cryotherapy = 2-4 minutes (following 60 second pre cooling), temperature between minus 110-140 °C
Cooling garments = 3-6 hours, 15 °C approximately
Other Factors to Consider
Recent research has suggested that using ice baths in combination with resistance training may hinder strength-based adaptation due to attenuating the molecular adaptive response.
As footballers train concurrently a lot of the time, there is limited research relating to how cooling therapies may impact on this approach to training. However, if for example players have an AM pitch session and then a PM lift in the gym, it wouldn't be recommended to take an ice bath after the gym session.
Indeed, research has also shown a hindrance effect when cooling therapies are adopted in between session <4 hours apart (i.e. such as AM and PM pre season sessions). Therefore, care must be taken around this period to enhance maximal adaptive effects.
To learn more about cooling therapies and recovery in sport, I'd suggest checking out a recent article I wrote for Sportsmith here.
Thank you for reading, see you next week.
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