Recovery
9:13 PM
The Effect of Cold Water Immersion On Recovery
Today we will talk about the CWI (cold water immersion) therapy recently it becomes one of the popular recovery protocol in swimming field. Before I talked more about the CWI let me give a small introduction about the recovery.
Recovery is one of the most important things in training, it used to minimize the risk of overtraining, injuries and it boost the enhancement process for the muscles tissues. And it becomes so important during the hard training or competition to sustain an optimal state of performance (Mair SD, Seaber AV, Glisson RR, Garrett WE 1996).
Consequently, we came up with many recovery protocols like massage therapy, foam rolling, compression garments, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, electrical stimulation, whole-body vibration and water immersion therapy (including: cold water, warm water, and contrast bathing).
When I planned to write in this topic I found out many mixing opinions and studies about the effect of CWI therapy for recovery in general and more specific studies about swimming, in my opinion, we need more specific studies in this topic to proof the effect of CWI therapy.
Cold water immersion (CWI), otherwise known as ice-baths, plunges pools and cold water therapy is a recovery process involving the immersion of the body into cold water (≤15˚C/59˚F) immediately after exercise in an attempt to enhance the recovery process (Bleakley, C., McDonough, S., Gardner, E., Baxter, G.D., Hopkins, J.T., & Davison, G.W. 2012).
In a study for Hohenauer E, Taeymans J, Baeyens J-P, Clarys P, Clijsen R (2015) on The Effect of Post-Exercise Cryotherapy on Recovery, in this study they test the effectiveness of CWI by measuring different factors: