Muscle Recovery; Review of Cold-Water Immersion Therapy

Athletes often train consecutive days in a row without a period of rest long enough to fully
recover before the next training session. Regular muscle soreness usually resolves in a week, but rarely do athletes get that time to recover. While muscle recovery is important for optimizing daily functioning, it is also of growing importance for athletes to optimize their athletic performance. Cold water immersion is a common technique used to improve muscle recovery. Whether CWI improves the body’s physiological recovery response or impacts the individual’s psychological recovery is unknown, but research has shown that cold water immersion performed at 10-15 degrees Celsius and immersion times between 5 and 15 minutes are better for muscle recovery than passive recovery.