Cold Immersion Is Even More Worthless Than We Thought? (New Study)

Let's say you want to reduce post exercise inflammation. You're not concerned with hypertrophy gains or muscle size gains or strength gains. Well, then get in the cold after your your workout. Do that for 1 to Some people can do 10 minutes. Reduce inflammation. The era for cold water immersion of Well, yeah, it's not good for muscle growth, but it obviously I'm doing it for performance cuz it enhances recovery. That era to me is over. Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for RP Strength. Is it time to chill out on cold immersion? Whoa, cool it there, Mike. What? Let's talk about it. What is cold immersion? Other than having to hang out with an aunt that, you know, has no sense of humor. It's pretty cold. You do sports. Somebody tells you that if you get into very cold water and sit there for a while, especially after your workout, — [gasps] — especially immersing muscles that you just trained, especially with the goal of improving recovery, that some good recovery things will happen to you. It is about as simple as that. Cold immersion says, you immerse yourself in cold, recovery will occur. Now, you would think that this is kind of some weird esoteric practice that almost nobody does. It seems kind of strange if you just look at it on paper, but it is incredibly popular. — [gasps] — Health clubs are getting cold immersion tanks and cryo chambers and stuff. Professional teams of all sports all around the world can't wait to do their cold immersion. People are taking cold showers at home and about a million health hacker podcasters are talking about how cold immersing everything is supposed to give you all kinds of amazing benefits.

Now, what is it supposed to do in its best realistic cases? Cold immersion, like all cold application, is supposed to reduce the inflammatory cascade that you get after training to enhance recovery and thus allow you to perform at the same level that you were before the exercise or close, and maybe even improve your mobility, so it can prevent that tight, sore feeling that makes you shittier at sports. It can potentially make it feel that you're not as sore, feel like which can enhance performance potentially if soreness and the psychology of pain is keeping you from performing your best. And it is supposed to be especially useful in peaking and re-peaking athletes. If you are a soccer player and you have a one day tournament where you play three games or two four games, you don't want the stiffness and soreness caused by each game to successively accumulate in future games. So, by the time you get to your most important game of the tournament, you're the most jammed up and super tight. So, ideally in this case, cold immersion after every single game would keep you looser and more performant such that you get to the last game and you are on your jam feeling not nearly as bad as you would have without actually getting into the cold. These are all potential upsides. The known, very well researched downside

that is pretty much definitive at this point from multiple other reviews of literature, is that cold water immersion within about an hour after you train for muscle growth reduces the amount of muscle growth you will be getting over the next several days as your muscles grow and heal. That's a given. We already know cold immersion reduces muscle growth stimulus. Which sucks, but if you are a powerlifter or a weightlifter, you're training mostly the neurological part of that whole system and the muscles are about as big as you want them in the near term. And if you have to peak or train with super heavy sessions back to back, if you are doing jujitsu or rock climbing or anything else, maybe cold immersion can give you a boost in performance where like you don't really care about muscle growth for that workout. Like people don't rock climb to grow their muscles. Maybe if you can cold immerse after rock climbing and go rock climb again, you'll have a better second session. So, it's not all about muscle growth. We just know that's a distinct downside already. And so, there's a downside we know for sure, and that's muscle growth gets reduced. Not eliminated, but reduced. But cue my favorite meme in the world, Anakin Padme meme, but we know that there is an upside to cold immersion, right? Right? Scott, real quick. Peak Padme and Natalie Portman, could she get it out of 10? — Oh, come on. All right, just checking to see if you're awake. — Come on. In any case, Who's going to say no to that? Come on. I mean, it would be a very strained no. If you say no, I got news for you. Yeah, we got some news for you. Um You Scott, do you remember the Phantom Menace, the Star Wars Episode 1? Sure. Okay. Do you remember how she had all of her like staff, it was a bunch of other ladies dressed in slightly more concealing attire, and then she had a like um a girl that looked like her that was like the fake Queen Amidala? Everybody Every one of those could get it 100%. — Yeah. I don't give a shit. Like you know that's not really Queen Amidala. I'm like, did you hear me ask really loud? Do you feel me? You know what I'm saying? Just cuz you're an advisor girl doesn't mean anyway. — [sighs and gasps] — So, let's look at the actual data. We have an amazing new document, a new

meta-analysis shows up out of nowhere, bro. Just at the club throwing bows at everybody. It is a massive multi-study review. They ended up with 30 randomized control styles and Oh my god. 30 randomized control studies. Randomized control studies, which means one group goes and does cold immersion, one group does placebo, and they tell both of them this will probably help you, and then they don't get to pick their own groups, and they measure performance after. The entire meta-analysis is 527 total participants. Man, that that's a lot. That's a big sample size. That's enough to start telling some things apart with some decent confidence. Most of them were males. We'll talk about that in limitations a little bit. But this was data that was published from the year 2008 all the way through 2025. Man, that's a lot of data. It is a lot of high quality data. And the cold water immersion protocols in this data set were very varied. So, we can't say, "Oh, but they just tested one type. " They had temperatures of 5 to 20° C, which is pretty goddamn cold to still pretty cold. — [gasps] — Immersion protocols of anywhere between 6 and 25 minutes. Scott, are you interested in 25 minutes at 40° F? Absolutely not. I'm not interested in 25 seconds. Yeah, 100%. 25 anything, really. And the immersion depths — [clears throat] — ranged from just partially, like putting in one limb, to putting in your lower body, to like the entire thing up to the neck. Because cold water immersion can be systemic or it can be like just immerse the area of your body that you want to cool off in the immersion tank. And now, here's the really fascinating part to me of this study. The exercises they tested people in, the modalities, the kinds of working out and fitness that they tested people in performance-wise to see if they could get the degrading performance out of them and then fix it in the cold water immersion were many, many different kinds. High intensity interval training, conventional resistance training, endurance [snorts] running, they had rugby, basketball, even jujitsu was in there, and a few endurance protocols like 10 km downhill running, and even half marathon. So, basically what we're asking here, what the meta-analysis was looking at, is if you do cold water immersion within about an hour of these, do your performance metrics come back recovered, more recovered, than if you did a placebo or just sat around doing nothing. And the performance outcomes mostly measured in this was strength or jump height. It's really simple. You do like an hour of jujitsu or whatever. Then you do like 15 minutes of cold plunge. Then you get out of the cold plunge, and they go, "Okay, we knew before you did jujitsu what your strength and your countermovement jump was like, your vertical jump. Now, we measure them again, and we measure them in the people that did the cold water immersion, not. And what was ostensibly we would be looking for, based on the claims of cold water immersion, is that the cold water immersion people would still be fatigued from their earlier jujitsu, but not as much. And that would be reflected in the fact that they are stronger and can jump higher than compared to if they didn't do the cold water immersion, which we know from the control group. Now, [snorts] here's the hammer. This meta-analysis drew the following conclusion. Cold water immersion does seem to help some people feel less sore after hard exercise. They reported feeling less sore. — [sighs and gasps] — And in one sub-analysis, creatine kinase, which is a measure of muscle damage, was lower. But when they applied a publication bias statistical correction to this data set, that mostly went away. So, we could have made the claim that cold water immersion causes less muscle damage, but we're not even comfortable making that. So, it for sure makes some people feel less sore. It doesn't dependably reduce mechanical damage indicators from a molecular detection perspective. But, here's what it for sure does not meaningfully do according to this review. Cold water immersion does not meaningfully restore strength or jump performance overall. And here's the really trippy thing. Partial or lower body only immersion worked just about as well as whole body immersion across outcomes, which is a fun way to put it because just about as well when you're not working is just about as doesn't do anything. Now, before we really crank on this

the poor neck of cold water immersion, let's step back a second and be a little scientific here. This is the law of averages. Some people really feel better after cold water immersion, and maybe they get performance enhancements. On average, there was no performance enhancement, but we can't say that's not the case for all people. So, if you really feel amazing after cold water immersion, I'm not going to tell you there's a 100% chance it's doing nothing for you performance-wise. And these studies didn't focus on local icing, and they didn't focus on the cryo chamber. But, mechanistically, it's all cold, but we can't be so specific to say, "Okay, cryo doesn't work for sure either. " Now, this study group was composed almost exclusively of males, a very few females. Sounds like my hangouts. Which means we can't really conclude that for females cold water immersion is equally ineffectual as it is for males. Let me tell you guys something that I seriously mean exactly as I'm saying it. The era for cold water immersion of, "Well, yeah, it's not good for muscle growth, but it obviously I'm doing it for performance cuz it enhances recovery. " That era, to me, is over based on this very expansive comprehensive review of literature. And it means that the next time you think about doing cold water immersion for any application including definitely hypertrophy and even sport performance, think again. Because if it's growth you're after, definitely don't do cold immersion after your training. Maybe do it hours later or something if you're into torturing yourself like that. It's a vibe, for sure. I get it. — [sighs and gasps] — But, if it's performance recovery you're after, well, cold immersion probably doesn't do that, seemingly. So, are you cold plunging because it is an evidence-based thing that is increasing your performance, or are you cold plunging because it's a vibe and you still haven't gotten the memo that it probably does not improve recovery and thus does not affect performance and doesn't help you become more of a spring chicken at your next basketball game? Because if that's the case, and cold water immersion actually doesn't work, it looks like the science of cold water immersion just got a bit chilly. I always wanted to do that reporter thing. Anyway, I'm going to go take my testicles and put them into cold water only for psychological punishment, which I deserve, and I will see you guys next time. —