Should You Take Ice Bath After Training Sessions?
Should you take an Ice bath after training sessions? If you’re a beginner and confused about taking an ice bath after training sessions, so the answer is yes you should take an Ice bath after training sessions. Ice bath or cryotherapy is used to reduce soreness, inflammation, and muscle pain. Ice bath helps you to recover faster. Many athletes use this technique to get relief after a tiring match or training sessions.
An ice bath is common among the players, some players use water therapy. Instead of ice, they use chilled water. Water therapy consists of both cold water and hot water based on one’s choice.
Why do football players take Ice baths after practice?
After intense exercise or a match, you feel muscle soreness. You feel muscle soreness because exercise or match causes microtrauma, that is tiny tears in muscle fibers. This muscle damage is microscopic. It stimulates muscles cell activity and helps to repair the damage and strengthen muscles. And this damage causes delayed onset muscle pain and soreness (DOMS), which occurs between 24 and 72 hours.
Here Ice baths help to build blood vessels and take out the waste products, like lactic acid. It decreases metabolic activity and slows down physiological processes. Helps to reduce swelling and tissue breakdown with rewarming blood circulation rate increases that help in faster recovery.
What is contrast therapy?
Contrast water therapy is an alternative to Ice baths. In contrast, water therapy athletes switch between cold and warm water baths. Experts say that it’s as effective as an Ice bath. Player’s like Reinold suggested taking contrast water therapy for temporary pain relief.
How to take Ice bath at home?
Take a bath tab, if you don’t have a bathtub get a child-size pool or you can also use a large drum known as a bin everything works the same. Now put the ice into it. Some say you should use only ice while others depict that a mixture of ice and water in the ratio of 3:1 is good for the recovery. This is also based on the factor that how much of your body you want to submerge.
Everyone can’t arrange enough ice to fill the bathtub to cover the entire body. So a 3:1 ratio would be better.
How cold should the water be?
The water temperature in which you’re going to take bath for recovery should be around 10-15 degrees Celsius (around 50-60 Fahrenheit). It will take around 10 minutes to be 10-15 degrees Celsius if you’re using a 3:1 water to ice ratio. And If it’s just Ice in the tub then go for it.
10 to 15 minutes of an ice bath is enough for the recovery.
Benefits of an Ice bath
1.It soothes sores muscle
Ice bath can soothes sore muscles. Experts depicted that putting your leg or body into the chilled water or ice tub can decrease the pain as nerve conduction velocity is slowed. And due to this, the pain of your body is reduced.
2.Reduces swelling on your body
Taking an Ice bath after training sessions or match helps to reduce swelling by breaking the blood flow to the area and slowing down cellular metabolism. Taking an Ice bath of 15-20 minutes will help.
3.Trains vagus nerve
The Vagus nerve is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system that connects organs like the brain, heart, liver, and gut. Cryotherapy or Ice bath, enhance the stimulation of the vagus nerve. When your body is exposed to the ice bathtub, sympathetic activity declines, while parasympathetic activity increases.
5.Reduces Stress
Ice bath helps athletes to reduce stress. After a game there’s intense inflammation in the body and inflammation can cause stress so an ice bath help to reduce inflammation and stress as well. A cold shower or ice bath sometimes produces endorphin a feel-good hormone and also helps to reduce stress.
Things to keep in mind before taking an Ice bath
- It can cause Hypothermia
Hypothermia is a disease that happens due to a sudden decrease in body temperature. Ice baths have the risk of hypothermia. So always take care that do not sit in an ice bathtub for a long period of time.
- Not for people with cardiac problem
No doubt Ice bath have several benefits but people with cardiac problems should not take Ice baths it can be dangerous for their health.
Wrapping Up!
Ice bath or cold water therapy has many short- and long-run
health benefits. But you should keep in mind that it’s not to cure all your ailments. The ice bath is not something to practice daily.
Ice bath helps you physically, mentally, and emotionally. Go ahead and take it couples of time per month it will make feel better. So , yes you should take Ice bath after training sessions.
Topic covered in this article
- Why do football players take an Ice bath after practice?
- What is contrast therapy?
- How to take Ice bath at home?
- How cold should the water be?
- Benefits of the Ice bath
- Things to keep in mind before taking an Ice bath.
Thank you for reading out this article. Hope this helps!
