And I am really in significant pain , you would probably be willing to give up some small percentage of eventual muscle growth after a single session to get out of pain . So , um of the cold strategies , cold water immersion is clearly the best approach rather than cold air or some other tactics . So a cold shower is probably not enough here .
And uh and so far in this discussion , we've mentioned cold water immersion and I talked about in the hyper section , how you would not want to do that immediately post exercise , which would be getting into cold water or an ice bath if you're trying to grow muscle mass . Having said that there is good evidence showing that cold water immersion specifically is effective at reducing muscle soreness . So it is a fair consideration and it's a classic example of how there are no free passes in physiology .
So those are all uh effective strategies outside of that really is the next largest category which is now thermal . And uh and so far in this discussion , we've mentioned cold water immersion and I talked about in the hyper section , how you would not want to do that immediately post exercise , which would be getting into cold water or an ice bath if you're trying to grow muscle mass . Having said that there is good evidence showing that cold water immersion specifically is effective at reducing muscle soreness .
You really do . Uh wanna be either in moderately cold , this is maybe 40 to 50 degree water , uh , for probably north of 15 minutes or you can be in sub 40 for as little as maybe five minutes to get some of the fact there . And there's been a number of studies .
It's always about what are you willing to give up and versus what you're willing to get . And the case of like cold water immersion , you may be thinking , yeah , I might want some hypertrophic adaptations . But if you're in that phase of training where you're actually trying to push more towards optimization in that moment rather than long term adaptation , then a an ice bath might be a great choice .
