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Ice Ice Baby
Ok maybe I’m the only one that laughed at the title, but it was worth it!
Anyway, recently while going in and out of overtraining to quickly achieve my goals, I’ve found that ICE is my best friend.
Ice packs, ice baths, contrast showers….all of them are just PHENOMENAL!
They help my muscles recover and they help me prevent any old injuries from flaring up and cause issues.
Ice reduces inflammation and can help reduce swelling. This can help keep injuries from flaring up and cause you to have altered movement patterns. I know that recently with all of the activities I’m doing, my ankle scar tissue has been irritated. So I’ve been taking extra time to do rehab exercises and ICE every single night. Most of the time more than once a day.
And guess what!?! My ankle is actually bothering me less than it has in a while even though I’m doing a ton more things to irritate it!
Icing can also help reduced muscle soreness so that you can take less time off between intense workouts! Icing helps injuries heal…exercising intensely basically causes minor muscle trauma, which when the muscles heal they become stronger – ice speeds this process. YAY!
Icing also helps flush out waste products such as lactic acid from the muscles, which again HELPS YOU RECOVER FASTER!
So if you want to recover faster, you may want to experiment with contrast showers (alternating hot and COLD water) and icing.
I mean who wouldn’t want to recover faster!?!
Anyone else using icing or contrast showers as part of their recovery routine?
Self-Experimentation vs. Accepting Conventional Wisdom
12 hours down, 4 more to go tomorrow.
My body actually feels pretty good aside from a very sore butt from the saddle. I do attribute it to the fact that I do weight training AND don’t eat gluten.
I’ve caused my body no additional inflammation from crap food!
My dinner tonight – Free roaming, grass-fed buffalo flank steak and “loaded” potatoes (nitrite free bacon, grass-fed cheese and a primal “ranch” sauce!
However even with the healthy eating, the joints and muscles aren’t 100% so I decided to take an ice bath today.
It couldn’t hurt right?
I mean worse case scenario I sit in frigid water for 10 minutes and it only makes everything go numb for a few minutes.
But I still got strange looks from everyone I told. Why would I ever take an ice bath?
WHY NOT!?!
It could help and if it doesn’t help, it most definitely won’t hurt! As I said above, worse case scenario I waste 10 minutes to only have the muscles go numb for a few minutes.
I must say though, it took some courage to fully submerge my lower body. I stuck one foot in and gasped. BUT everything feels pretty good right now.
We will have to see tomorrow though! (And hey, Tim Ferriss touts them for their fat loss benefits so I guess that isn’t a bad extra bonus! ;-))
Anyway, the point of all this isn’t really to talk about my ice bath, it is to pose the question: Why are people so afraid of TRYING something if conventional wisdom doesn’t tell you to do it?
I mean what really do you have to lose if you TRY something in the hopes of becoming healthier/fitter/stronger?
Some wasted time?
NOT EVEN.
Time isn’t wasted if you LEARN SOMETHING FROM IT!
So why are people so afraid to try things that aren’t approved by conventional wisdom but have studies proving their benefits while they so easily accept that eating Gatorade chews is how they should fuel for a competition just because the media tells them to!?!
Can someone please explain this to me?
Man Bicep 