The use of cold water immersion after exercise training is a common practice by athletes and is often condoned and encouraged by both the coaching and sports medicine staff. Some believe that cold tubs enhance recovery by reducing muscle soreness and thus may serve to more quickly restore performance capabilities compared to passive rest. This area has been well researched with equivocal findings. Some posit that the beneficial effects of cold water immersion are largely psychological and do little physiologically to enhance recovery.
More recently, there is some research to suggest that routine immersion in cold water following work-outs may actually be counter-productive; by interfering with the body’s adaptive response to the exercise training stimulus. This calls into question the appropriateness of the wide spread use of this recovery modality and certainly is a cause for concern among coaches and athletes.
A new study published ahead of print in the prestigious Journal of Physiology provides some very novel information pertaining to the potential deleterious effects that cold tubs have on strength and hypertrophy adaptations. The researchers split 21 physically active trainee’s into an active recovery group and a cold water immersion group (CWI).Both groups trained twice per week for 12 weeks and would follow up their workouts with a 10 minute recovery session involving active recovery or CWI depending on their group assignment. Strength and muscles mass improved significantly more in the active recovery group. In addition, the active recovery group demonstrated a greater number of myonuclei (important for muscle growth) per muscle fibre.
In a follow-up study, 9 subjects performed a lower body workout on two occasions, once followed with CWI and the other time followed with active recovery. Muscle biopsies were taken 2, 24 and 48 hours post workouts. The researchers essentially found that CWI attenuates the workout induced changes in satellite cell number and activity of kinases. This is thought to be the reason that chronic use of CWI post-exercise may blunt strength and hypertrophy adaptations. The authors advise that CWI as a recovery strategy should be reconsidered. This begs the question; are we doing more harm than good when we have our athletes sit in cold tubs after training?
Reference:
Roberts, LA., et al. Post-exercise cold water immersion attenuates acute anabolic signalling and long-term adaptations in muscle to strength training. Journal of Physiology. Ahead of print.
