There are two different ways that cold exposure can provide benefits when it comes to performance. The first is improved recovery and the second is cooling body temperature during a workout.
Let’s start with improving recovery. Doing cold exposure after high intensity exercise, can help to improve your ability to exercise with high levels of power in your next workout, can help reduce muscle soreness, and increase perceived recovery levels.
However, one thing to mention is that if your goal is purely hypertrophy and/or strength, meaning your goal is purely to build as much muscle or gain as much strength as possible, then doing cold exposure post workout is not ideal.
But again, if your goal is more athletically based, or endurance based then cold exposure post workout can help you recover faster so that you can perform at high intensities in subsequent workouts.
The second possible performance benefit from cold exposure is not something that I had heard of before. And it’s not something that I have personally tried yet. And it’s all about reducing your internal body temperature during your competition, game, or workout.
Think about when you’re really hot. Imagine you’ve either been running for a long time, working out for a long time, or in the middle of a competition outside and been in the heat of the summer for a long time. If someone gives you a cold rag to cool off, where do you usually put it?
I don’t know about you, but for me it’s usually my head or my neck. And I’m sure most of you would say the same. Turns out, that’s not the best place to put it.
In order to most efficiently and effectively reduce our core body temperature, we should place the cold rag on our upper cheeks, palms of our hands, or bottoms of our feet. These three areas of our body are what’s called glabrous skin surfaces.
And what that means is in these areas, underneath the surface of the skin the vasculature is such that the body is more able to dump heat more readily. Therefore having the ability to decrease your body temperature more quickly.
And this is important because the window of temperature at which our muscles are able to optimally perform is actually a pretty narrow window. So, if the temperature of our muscles are overheated, then they are more likely to quit sooner.
Therefore, if you can expose one of these glabrous skin surfaces - most regularly experimented on has been the palms of the hands for practical reasons - then you can bring your body temperature down to the desirable range for optimal muscular performance.
And the main benefit you see from your performance is from the overall volume of work you can put in over time. It’s not going to allow you to lift heavier per say. It’s not going to allow you to run faster. It will allow you to lift as heavy as you normally could lift for longer. It’s going to allow you to run as fast as you could normally run for longer. I’ll provide a specific example of how you might see an improvement in a moment.
But an important nuance to be aware of is that you don’t want the cold exposure to these skin surfaces to be too cold causing what’s called vasoconstriction - when you constrict blood flow.
So, if you were interested in trying this out, what would that actually look like? Well, I can tell you for one that I’ve never tried this before, but this is something I want to try, and something similar has been tried in studies.
Pick an exercise or two that you’re wanting to focus most on. In between sets when you’re resting for 1-2 minutes, hold a cold water bottle in the palms of your hands. This should thereby allow you to do greater volumes of work for a longer period of time throughout your workout.
Again this is overtime. This isn’t going to allow you to go from doing 20 push-ups to now all of a sudden you can knock out 40. The change would look something like this.
The first test you would do would be without cooling your palms in between sets. So it could look like doing 6 sets of push-ups with a 1 minute rest between sets. And maybe your reps for each set are 20, 16, 12, 8, 6, 4, so a total of 66 push-ups over the course of 6 sets.
The idea or the thought or the hypothesis is that if you wait a few days and do this again but now in between sets you cool your palms then it might look like the following. You do another 6 sets of push-ups with a 1 minute rest, the thought is your push up total of 66 will go up. You might do something like 20, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8. So the reps across all your sets would be much higher.
If you give this a try, definitely let me know about the results that you experience.