Cold Water Immersion and Hypertrophy

TL;DR:

Cold water immersion may reduce soreness but can hinder muscle growth if done immediately post-workout. Ice baths blunt the body’s natural inflammatory response, which is critical for hypertrophy. If building muscle is your goal, delay or avoid cold plunges post-lift to maximize gains and allow full muscle repair and growth.

Do ice baths kill your gains?

Ice baths have become a modern trend, with many people touting their benefits including Joe Rogan and Andrew Humberman. The reported benefits are numerous, including reduced inflammation and soreness, increased alertness and mental acuity, and improved exercise recovery.

However, there’s also some evidence that ice baths may actually be counterproductive, specifically for building muscle. In this article, we are going to discuss the effects of ice baths, aka cold water immersion.

Specifically, we are going to focus on their effect on muscle hypertrophy. We'll also give you some practical considerations when it comes to using ice baths if your goal is to build muscle.

Lastly, we’ll offer some practical advice to help better support your pre-, post-, and off-day recovery. With these insights, you can achieve maximum gains and give your body the exact support it needs.

It's our hope that you’ll come away from this article better informed about what your body does and doesn’t need in recovery. 

Benefits of Cold Water Immersion

Before we dive into the science, let's set the table with some common conceptions about cold plunges.

Exposure to cold temperatures via cold water immersion or other forms of cryotherapy have a few potential benefits. They may:

• Reduce acute inflammation,
• Modulate the metabolic activity of different cells,
• Reduce the activity of pro-inflammatory immune cells, and
• Induce vasoconstriction, which results in reduced blood flow.[1]

This sounds like a good thing, right?

In some situations, it may be. For example, there is some evidence that cryotherapy can help reduce soreness following exercise.[2] Some athletes use this to their advantage if they have a large workload and must perform their best.

However, it’s important to understand that inflammation is a naturally occurring process that serves a physiological purpose. It serves a physiological purpose. It is not to be confused with outright injury. And, perhaps most importantly, reducing inflammation at all costs may not be a smart idea.

It's also important to note that these benefits say nothing about gains. They may be great for your body, but are they good for a post-workout body? Let's continue exploring.

What is Inflammation?

It's important to understand what inflammation means before we get into the nitty gritty about cold water immersion benefits.

Inflammation does not mean swelling, which is what most people think of when they hear the word. Swelling can be a symptom of inflammation, but inflammation is simply a response from our immune system.

In response to an injury, our immune system is activated it releases a ton of different inflammatory molecules like interleukin-6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-a). You don’t need to know anything about these. You simply need to understand that inflammation is essentially a response by our immune system.

While chronic, low-grade inflammation is inherently bad, acute inflammation isn’t. Acute inflammation is usually resolved within a couple of days.

Acute inflammation is part of the recovery process to help repair damaged tissue.[3] If you blunt acute inflammation, you’re essentially slowing down the healing process. This could prolong the time it takes to recover from an injury.

Theoretically, submerging your injured leg in cold water may help you reduce soreness and inflammation in the short term. However, it may actually cause the injury to take longer to fully heal. This is because the inflammatory response is necessary for wound healing.

Now, what the heck does this have to do with muscle hypertrophy? Let's see how inflammation and muscle mass relate to one another.

Inflammation and Exercise

Whenever we lift weights, we actually create small tears in our muscles called “micro-tears” or “microtrauma.” In other words, lifting weights technically injures our muscles the same way that a paper cut injures your skin. The mechanisms that initiate wound healing following a normal injury are similar to the mechanisms that initiate muscle repair and growth following resistance training. This means that the inflammatory response following lifting is critically important to actually grow your muscles.

For example, IL-6 is one of the inflammatory molecules secreted by our immune system following resistance training. This is a critical component important for stimulating muscle growth.[4][5] If you blunt this inflammatory response following lifting, you could theoretically be blunting your ability to build muscle.

Not a great idea, is it? It would seem that word we love to hate is a critical component of our gains.

So are ice baths bad for muscle growth? Let's look at the research.

The Science of Ice Baths

A 2019 study found that a 15-minute cold water plunge immediately after resistance training reduced the release of testosterone and cytokines. Results included IL-6 and TNF-a and were distinct when compared to the control group.[6]

Again, this shows that cold water immersion can reduce inflammatory molecules. And remember, these are the molecules that are important to initiate muscle repair and growth. However, it doesn’t tell us anything about actual muscle growth and repair. Thankfully we have long-term studies looking at the effects of cold-water immersion on muscle hypertrophy as well.

Two studies, one by Roberts et al., and one by Fyfe et al. sought to answer these questions. These studies had participants perform different resistance training protocols for an extended period of time. Protocols were maintained for more than 6 weeks per participant.

Participants either performed cold plunge after their workout or performed some sort of passive/active recovery modality. These passive/active modalities included stretching, cardio, etc. Both studies showed that cold water immersion significantly reduced muscle growth. These results were distinct when compared to the passive/active recovery modalities.[7][8]

They also performed muscle biopsies to further highlight these results. Biopsies showed that cold water immersion negatively impacted specific pathways that are involved in muscle growth. This includes muscle protein synthesis and muscle protein breakdown.

So it would seem ice baths are not all they're cracked up to be. But can they actually be detrimental? Let's dive deeper.

Do Ice Baths Reduce Muscle Growth?

Overall, the evidence is pretty clear that ice baths do not help muscle growth. But do ice baths after a workout reduce muscle gains?

If you want to maximally grow muscle, knock one step off your post-workout routine. You simply don’t want to be doing a cold plunge after a workout.

Now, this doesn’t mean that cold water immersion kills your gains altogether. While the studies do show that cold water immersion blunts hypertrophy, it doesn’t negate it completely. The participants who did the cold baths after a workout still gained muscle, just not as much as those who didn’t. So, to say that cold baths after a workout completely kill your gains isn’t totally accurate.

Another important topic to discuss is the timing of the ice bath. Most of these studies that show a negative effect on hypertrophy use ice baths immediately after the resistance training protocol. These processes that initiate muscle repair begin pretty much immediately after training as well. What we don’t know, is whether cold water immersion has the same detrimental effect on muscle growth if it’s delayed by several hours.

For example, what would happen if you trained in the morning and used cold water therapy much later in the evening? Or what if you took an ice bath first thing in the morning and then trained later in the afternoon? Would it be distinctly different from an immediate ice bath after a workout?

The truth is, we don’t really have the answers to these questions currently. That being said, some assumptions are not off the table. It makes logical sense that the detrimental effects to hypertrophy may be less if compared to an ice bath immediately after training. Hopefully, we will have more research on this topic to have a concrete answer to these questions.

Bottom Line

If your primary goal is to build muscle and nothing else, then you'll probably want to avoid ice baths after the gym altogether. The two, it would seem, are simply at odds.

It's clear that cold water immersion does not help muscle growth, and in fact interferes with hypertrophy. That being said, if you’re an athlete who practices a specific sport and uses ice baths for recovery, take note. Maybe consider separating the ice bath from the bout of exercise as much as possible. Theoretically, this should help attenuate the negative effects on muscle growth.

However, your potential muscle growth goes far beyond your ability to support and heal your muscles after a workout. In truth, your nutrition and supplement game is just as important. And Outwork Nutrition has just the supplements to help.

Outwork Nutrition makes science-backed supplements to support YOUR hard work. Try our pre-workout (also available in caffeine-free pre-workout) and post-workout powder. Each is designed to  to support your exercise performance and muscle recovery.  💪

If you’re looking for full wellness routine supplements, we also offer our powerful and effective natural sleep aid. Don’t let those gains go to waste. Give your body everything it needs as it recovers between days. 

References

1. Tipton, M J et al. “Cold water immersion: kill or cure?.” Experimental physiology vol. 102,11 (2017): 1335-1355. doi:10.1113/EP086283

2. Bleakley, Chris et al. “Cold-water immersion (cryotherapy) for preventing and treating muscle soreness after exercise.” The Cochrane database of systematic reviews vol. 2012,2 CD008262. 15 Feb. 2012, doi:10.1002/14651858.CD008262.pub2

3. Koh, Timothy J, and Luisa Ann DiPietro. “Inflammation and wound healing: the role of the macrophage.” Expert reviews in molecular medicine vol. 13 e23. 11 Jul. 2011, doi:10.1017/S1462399411001943

4. McKay, Bryon R et al. “Association of interleukin-6 signalling with the muscle stem cell response following muscle-lengthening contractions in humans.” PloS one vol. 4,6 e6027. 24 Jun. 2009, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006027

5. Mitchell, Cameron J et al. “Muscular and systemic correlates of resistance training-induced muscle hypertrophy.” PloS one vol. 8,10 e78636. 9 Oct. 2013, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078636

6. Earp, Jacob E et al. “Cold-water immersion blunts and delays increases in circulating testosterone and cytokines post-resistance exercise.” European journal of applied physiology vol. 119,8 (2019): 1901-1907. doi:10.1007/s00421-019-04178-7

7. Fyfe, Jackson J et al. “Cold water immersion attenuates anabolic signaling and skeletal muscle fiber hypertrophy, but not strength gain, following whole-body resistance training.” Journal of applied physiology (Bethesda, Md. : 1985) vol. 127,5 (2019): 1403-1418. doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00127.2019

8. Roberts, Llion A et al. “Post-exercise cold water immersion attenuates acute anabolic signalling and long-term adaptations in muscle to strength training.” The Journal of physiology vol. 593,18 (2015): 4285-301. doi:10.1113/JP270570