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 .
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 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 . In addition , if you fall into a scenario like Natasha did and you realize like I'm just so unbelievably sore , this might cost me three or four or five or six days of training .
So what are some other methods that we can use to alleviate acute soreness ? Well , if we continue on the same theme , which is saying , OK , we use some sort of pressure manipulation to enhance recovery .
