Do cold water baths decrease muscle mass gains?
Cold water/ice baths and cryotherapy are very popular among athletes to reduce muscle soreness after a heavy training session. While these strategies might reduce muscle soreness, it has been suggested that they possibly lower the adaptive response to training.
Our study investigated whether cold water baths affect muscle protein synthesis after a single exercise session, as well as during a 2-week resistance training period (training with postexercise cooling 3 times per week).
For each subject, one leg was immersed in cold water (8 degrees Celsius), and the other leg in thermoneutral water (30 degrees Celsius), for 20 minutes after each training session.
The cold water bath reduced the muscle protein synthetic response to a single training session. In addition, the cold water also reduced muscle protein synthesis rates during the full 2-week training period.
This suggests that ice baths and cryotherapy should be avoided if muscle adaptation is the main training goal.
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Interesting, 20 minutes in cold water seems rather long to me, do people do that? I guess mostly only pro-athletes? But the study is about recreational athletes.. at the gyms i visit no-one takes a cold bath or shower longer than 3 minutes (if at all)
Speaking for myself, this recreational athlete just takes a hot sauna for 10 minutes and then a cold shower for 1 minute after resistance exercise.
Hi! First thanks for sharing your work
I was wondering why you choose a CWI of 8 degrees and 20 minutes?
I’ve read (briefly) the section method and didn’t find an explanation for this
And since the research I know used something around 10 degrees and 10 minutes of CWI (like PMID 26174323) I wonder why choosing more time and less temperature
Thanks again for all your work, hug from Argentina 💪🏻
Similar time and duration has been used before: PMID: 25760154
If you do a shorter protocol, the effects will likely be less. This would require more subjects to clearly see if that smaller effect is real, or just chance. So it’s just safer to do a longer protocol to get a clear conclusion.