Ice Baths: Separating Science from Hype: Full Transcript

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no meaningful difference in post-match recovery or long-term physical performance when comparing cold water immersion, hot immersion, or even placebo recovery methods. So, once again, meh. Yeah, that's kind of the takeaway here, right? It's like [Music] Hello and welcome back to the How to Fitness podcast with me, Kate Lyman,

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folks eat this. Anyway, I don't I wanted to know like what the the frequency of assault you've experienced. It's probably also like algorithm. It shows you one video and you probably watched it for a bit too long and it's like Kate loves ground beef and bananas. Really wants to eat this. Um no, miss me with that. You will never catch me eating that and I can say never

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the same thing, right? Um, and I know that you always feel amazing afterwards. Whether the actual health benefits are there, who knows? We will discuss that today. But, um, yeah, it's people either love it or they're like, "Heck no, I'm not doing that. It sounds awful." So, it's, um, yeah, it's cool topic. I'm really excited to learn because when it comes to like biohacking tools, this this totally fits into like the

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where people sit in wheelie bins uh full of ice. So yeah, we're discussing ice baths today or um or it's often called as I mentioned its fancier name of cold water immersion. Um, and you've seen it everywhere from athletes, influencers, Wimhof breathing his way through frozen lakes. I'm sure anyone who's known about cold water immersion, um, probably aware of Wimhof and how much of a fan he was of this thing. I

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reference, we're going to plug into the show notes. Um, so all the research nerds can delve into it a little bit deeper. And if you don't like what I say, take it up with the researchers, not me. I'm just reporting what they find. Don't shoot the messenger, please. But that's you all the time, right? Yeah. Exactly. And have you ever done Sorry, you did say you have done it.

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long before Instagram reals and as Kate mentioned, the biohackers um kind of got their hands on it. So, take Scandinavia for example. Ice swimming and plunging into frozen lakes after a sauna is a long-standing tradition. Um, in Russia, people cut holes in frozen rivers for what they call I I was going to try to pronounce this, but now I'm backing out because I feel like I'm going to embarrass myself. I should have looked

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interesting to me. But then like I haven't heard about him in a while. So you said he's problematic and I'm assuming that there's something happened. Yeah, there's been lots of claims about abuse from him. Um so I don't know them in enough detail to go into depth. Um I don't want to get sued. Um, however, there has been a lot of abuse claims that seem like they hold up pretty well.

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Literally. Yeah. 10 points to Kate. Yeah. Um I was going to list through and through here, but you've literally named all of them. So yeah, there's a lot of claims um that uh you will hear from people. However, there's so much nuance around it. Um so, just to kind of put out the statement now, like not all of the claims are equally supported by science. Um and that's what we're about to find out. So,

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don't fit that demographic um you also need to be a little bit wary that the findings also might even be less beneficial or even more harmful um than is being reported in the literature too. Do you know in that meta analysis how the the split between male female? I can't remember it off the top of my head unfortunately. It did say it in there but I should have Yeah, it did. But it's as I said it was very

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they'll call it like cold water immersion or whatever and it's standing under a cold shower, others are sitting in a really cold ice bath. Um, so the temperatures also massively vary. Therefore, trying to find out what works and doesn't is really difficult because the research is so thin once again on all of those because I'm thinking of like the hot and cold, right? Like the sauna and cold

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water consistently blunts hypertrophy with smaller muscle growth seen in the ice bath groups. Those strength outcomes were often less affected. So, to put it really simply, if you're chasing size or strength, hopping into an ice bath straight after lifting is is going to slow your progress. That one makes a lot of sense to me, right? Like that one's pretty by the sounds of

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isn't boosted, um, some updates from 2022 suggested that cold water immersion might help particular power measures recover faster. Um, one review noted potential improvements in muscular power performance, muscle soreness, and perceived recovery after highintensity efforts. But once again, very thin on the ground with research there. This final study on this point, um, just to kind of hammer it home, is a 2025 study

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and strength gains aspect is if you're dampening inflammation after doing a workout, you're probably going to be dampening your progress. Um, so this is why we say to use ice baths really strategically, not automatically. So yeah, it does help, but very very kind of marginally or maybe not very helpfully. Anyway, immune function. Another one that Kate nailed is is so unbelievably shaky. So, one large

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online around ice baths about how it can like activate your brown fat and make you burn calories like a furnace. There's actually a TV show with a well-known TV doctor here who sadly passed away, but he did a kind of deep dive into cold water immersion and burning fat. And he was kind of raving about how great it was. But let's quickly unpack it. So, just for people listening so we know, there's two

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TikTok are are quite overstated. Um plus also, which is important to note is your body adapts. So the more you do it, the less dramatic that calorie burn becomes over time. So yes, brown fat is real. Um cold water can switch it on, but is is an ice bath going to replace like lifting weights or going for a run? And um absolutely not. Um this is going to be like a tiny bonus, a tiny top up. This isn't a matter of white fat

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significantly. It doesn't mean chronic inflammation, but an immediate response to that shock. Um, so that was always just quite an important thing to note. Um, in regards to stress, it doesn't budget right away. And I thought this was quite cool is immediately like 1 hour after no impact. 24 or 48 hours later, no impact. But there's like a shortterm benefit. So about 12 hours after you do cold water immersion, there

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cuz I as I said, I haven't done it kind of since having kids because my mornings are now not free to go for a swim unfortunately. But like yes, I used to go new cold water swimming and I feel great afterwards. But was it the fact that I was having a nice morning at the beach with my friends having a swim or was it the cold water that made me feel great? Like it's it's hard to really measure that.

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tragic accidents in open water swimmers who jump straight into freezing lakes. Um it's not necessarily the cold itself that gets them. It's like the shock that comes from jumping into the cold water. Side note, did you ever as a kid go to a hotel and then you'd like jump back and forth from the pool to the hot tub? I just remember my grandma being like, "Don't do that. You'll die. A child died doing that."the shock, you know,

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add, so you touched on this in the beginning, but actually a listener of our podcast had come to me and and kind of talked through one of these topics of saying, "Hey, I would love you guys to do an episode on ice baths and specifically talk about, you know, what the research says for males versus females." And it's like, we don't know. There's not a lot of it. There is a study I'm thinking of that I haven't

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Yeah, if it was like two years ago I'm like I'm pretty shaky there. But I love how much we learned from doing these episodes from listening to your deep dives and doing my deep dives and everything else. So thank you all for listening. See you next time.