Ice Ice Maybe: MCPHS Physical Therapist Explain Why You Should Chill Out on Ice Baths

Those frosty plunges won’t help your workout gains but might still boost your mood.

Ice baths are everywhere on the internet, with celebrities, influencers, and other notable figures touting polar-bear-style plunges as a quick fix for workout recovery and wellness.

But do they really work?

Not if you're looking for performance gains, says Christopher Joyce, an assistant professor in the School of Physical Therapy at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS).

"The scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that ice baths are not beneficial for athletic performance," Joyce says. "Cold water immersion doesn't aid muscle recovery or muscle performance. In fact, it's been shown to be detrimental to muscle performance."

Joyce points to research that confirms cold plunges can harm your strength training efforts. One systemic review of 10 different studies found that using an ice bath immediately after resistance training decreased strength gains from the exercise sessions.

Cold water reduces inflammation in your body, which may feel good in the moment (just think about the relief you can get from putting an ice pack on a rolled ankle), but it's harmful to the physiological benefits of exercise.

"After you exercise, there's certain physiological processes that help you recover and increase muscle mass and strength," Joyce explains. "Cold water immersion has been shown to be slow down to the natural processes that build stronger muscles."

When you exercise, you create micro-tears in your muscles, and the recovery process repairs those tears and rebuilds your muscles so they're stronger and bigger. When the trauma from exercise activates the cells in your muscle fibers, it triggers an inflammatory response that plays a key role in helping them repair and rebuild from the damage.

Getting into an ice bath right after exercise can disrupt that critical inflammatory response and interfere with the ideal damage-repair cycle that promotes exercise adaptation.

"The inflammatory process sends cells to heal and regenerate the muscles that you damage during exercise, and if you've stressed yourself at a sufficient intensity, you build capacity so that the next time you do that exercise, you have a little bit more space to exercise," Joyce explains.

He says damage and inflammation can cause soreness or pain after exercise, which is why an ice bath might feel so soothing. But just because it feels good doesn't mean it is good for recovery.

"An ice bath might dampen that inflammation and dampen that process so that you feel less pain and soreness," Joyce says. "But inflammation is an essential component of recovery.”

The conventional thinking on the role of ice is shifting in other realms, too, Joyce says. While the go-to recommendation for soft tissue injuries (like sprained ankles) used to be RICE —Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation—recent research suggests a better method is to use PEACE and LOVE. This approach ditches the ice part of the equation and calls for an initial response of Protection, Elevation, Avoid Anti-Inflammatories, Compression, and Education. This is followed by a management protocol of Load, Optimism, Vascularization, and Education, which turns to movement and blood flow to help the body recover.

The "avoid anti-inflammatories" part of PEACE reaffirms the field's shifting direction, acknowledging inflammation's important role in injury recovery. Ice is no longer the first line of defense against injury because researchers have found that the body needs to let the inflammatory process unfold for optimal healing.

While the scientific evidence doesn't support the use of ice baths for athletic performance, Joyce stresses they can still be a valuable tool for other purposes.

"There seems to be a lot of psychological reward and pleasure in people doing this, and that should not be discredited," Joyce says. "If you get into an ice bath and feel better, or get a jolt of energy from it, or find meditative benefits through freezing cold water, then ice baths could still be beneficial for you, even if they won't help you build strength or shave time off your 5K run."