Welcome to the Flex Diet Podcast, where we dive deep into the realms of nutrition and recovery strategies to enhance performance and health. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In today's episode, I'm tackling the chilling topic of cold water immersion and its impact on muscle mass and athletic performance. This discussion is sparked by the common debate surrounding the use of cold therapy in training regimens—does it aid in recovery, or could it potentially hinder your gains? This episode is especially timely as we wrap up enrollment for the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. For those interested in nuanced approaches to recovery, performance, and health, this conversation will shed light on how to incorporate recovery strategies like cold water immersion effectively into your regimen, considering your specific goals, be they hypertrophy or peak performance. Sponsors: Enroll in the Physiological Flexibility Certification March 18 - March 25: https://miket.me/PFC-pod. After March 25, join the waitlist: www.physiologicflexibility.com See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://miketnelson.com/faves/ Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at http://drinklmnt.com/mikenelson (automatically applied at checkout) Friends of Mike, create an account and get 25% off your first order of Tecton: https://blog.tectonlife.com/ambassador/dr-mike-t-nelson/
Welcome to the Flex Diet Podcast, where we dive deep into the realms of nutrition and recovery strategies to enhance performance and health. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In today's episode, I'm tackling the chilling topic of cold water immersion and its impact on muscle mass and athletic performance. This discussion is sparked by the common debate surrounding the use of cold therapy in training regimens—does it aid in recovery, or could it potentially hinder your gains?
This episode is especially timely as we wrap up enrollment for the Physiologic Flexibility Certification. For those interested in nuanced approaches to recovery, performance, and health, this conversation will shed light on how to incorporate recovery strategies like cold water immersion effectively into your regimen, considering your specific goals, be they hypertrophy or peak performance.
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[00:00:00] Dr Mike T Nelson: Hey, what's going on? Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk all about things to increase lean body mass, muscle performance, improve your body composition, and do all of it without destroying your health within a flexible framework. Wanted to give you a reminder that depending upon when you are listening to this podcast, The Physiologic Flexibility Certification is closing Monday, March 25th, 2024 at midnight.
Pacific Standard Time. So if you still want to get in, I will put a link to the enrollment page with all the details below. If you are listening to this after that date, we will include a link to the waitlist, where you can get onto the newsletter for the next time that it will open, which will be this coming fall.
Probably September or October. I don't have an exact date yet. But as you've probably heard, the PhysFlex Cert is all things to increase your body's ability to handle stressors, to become more anti fragile, and to recover in record time. It is split out between the four homeostatic regulators. One being temperature, two being changes in pH, three changes in expanded fuels.
This includes ketones and lactate. And four is oxygen and CO2. Today we're talking about cold water immersion and its effects on body comp and performance, and also primarily muscle mass. If you spend any time on the old internets you'll see that pretty much everybody hates cold water immersion for its effects on muscle.
And that's pretty much the end of the conversation. Which I find very fascinating how definition of fitness overall still seems to revolve only around body comps. Now, again, if you want to get leaner, you want to add more muscle, that's great. I think there's definitely a time and a place to do that. And if that's your goal, then by all means go crazy.
I'm for it. However, my pet peeve is the assumption that if you're doing stuff in fitness, that body comp is the only thing that you're interested in, which obviously professional athletes are going to be more interested in performance. My bias is people should be interested in a hybrid of performance and body comp because performance is what's going to drive changes in body comp and adding more muscle.
It's just very hard to measure, say, a gain of one pound of lean body mass over time or losing a couple pounds of fat. It's very difficult to measure, but if you're measuring your other parameters, then you can get a good hint at it. If your performance in the gym is going up or holding steady, you're in a caloric deficit.
You see the scale weight starting to go down. Odds are you're losing body fat or you could do circumference like waist measurements, et cetera. So there are ways you can definitely get at it. But I think focusing on performance. As the thing to drive day in and day out and then obviously supporting that with nutrition and sleep and recovery, etc.
Those are going to be the main drivers for that. However there is data to show that cold water immersion immediately post training can definitely affect your gains, which I've talked a lot about this before. And in the PhysFlex cert, I actually go through three of the main studies. That, that is based on one of the main ones was from researcher Fuchs or Fuchs F U C H S in 2020 they did look at cold water immersion and they had participants in pretty chilly water.
10 minutes at 10 degrees centigrade. So for those who may not be very familiar with the metric system 10 degrees centigrade is, I believe, 50 degrees? Yeah, 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Which, that doesn't sound like it's really that cold, but if you're sitting in 50 degree water for several minutes, especially 10 minutes, it's friggin cold.
And they did this immediately post training. What they found was that, yeah, there was a little bit less muscle mass for that. Which I thought was pretty interesting. This was done at Dr. Luke Van Loon's lab. The formal title of it, if you want to find it, is Post Exercise Cooling Impairs Muscle Protein Synthesis Rates in Recreational Adults.
This was published in 2020, so very good study, did a lot of great stuff here. And, one of the takeaways that, from this study, and again, I go through some of these studies and implications in the PhysFlex cert, there wasn't really much of a change in inflammation in healthy people in most of the cold water immersion studies that we've seen so far.
Now again, if you have a pathology or you're doing some other parameters, maybe, it's not But I'm not convinced that cold water immersion significantly blunts inflammation. So a lot of times online you'll see people saying that, oh, it impairs muscle gains because it's blunting inflammation, therefore you need some inflammation and all your gains go down the toilet.
It is true that you do need some inflammation at the muscle level temporarily. You do need reactive oxygen species, these other things to serve as signaling effects. There are many different signaling effects going on. The main thing just being the fibers themselves under stress. However, I'm not convinced that inflammation is one of them.
With this study, and I think there's one other study that showed the same thing, it seems to, it being cold water immersion, directly impair muscle protein synthesis, which is pretty fascinating. So muscle protein synthesis, or MPS, is the process of taking amino acids shoving them into muscle tissue to make it a little bit bigger and stronger.
Now, to what degree does cold water immersion impair this process? And what does that mean in terms of actual muscle lost or potential gains left on the table? It's really hard to say. We don't know what that number is because some studies use DEXA, which I couldn't parlay it out on an individual level.
Some studies use muscle cross sectional fiber size. So it was very hard to figure out how much of an issue this is. The other issue is that they did this immediately post exercise. So again, if you are doing your cold water immersion at a different time I have not seen any studies yet looking at different timing.
So maybe 2 hours is better, maybe 5 hours, 6 hours, the answer is we just don't know at this point. Another consideration too is that not every single study showed a negative effect. So again, one of my other pet peeves is they make it sound like every study that's ever been done showed this effect. Now I would agree it's probably a real effect.
We do have multiple very well done studies showing that cold water immersion does impair the muscle gains in terms of hypertrophy size. Performance, however, is very split. And then, another study done by Dr. Horgan. This was done from Greg Hoff's lab. This is entitled, No Effective Repeated Post Resistance Exercise Cold or Hot Water Immersion on In Season Body Composition and Performance Response and Academic Performance.
Rugby players, a randomized controlled crossover design. And I'm not going to bore you with every single detail here, but very well done study. This is done in higher level athletes. This is not a very short chronic study. This is a longer 12 week study. I know people will argue that 12 weeks is not real long, but For most things in exercise phys, 12 weeks is pretty darn good.
It's a randomized and controlled crossover design. So they did everything they can to set up the study in a decent way. Body composition was collected using a dual energy x ray absorptivity, absorptometry so DEXA. And they did look at some neuromuscular stuff with a squat and a counter movement jump.
And what is interesting to point out though. is the parameters they used were unfortunately a little bit different. So for this study they used a higher temperature. So they used 15 degrees centigrade, which is closer to 59 degrees Fahrenheit. And they used a little bit longer. They used it for 15 minutes.
Now again, maybe that's across some threshold that they didn't see in effect. We don't know but on this study what they found was it Didn't seem to impair any Anything really? I'm just verifying this Yep, so they did use a repeated four week cold water immersion 15 minutes at 15 degrees Centigrade so the time was a little bit longer, but the water temp was a little bit higher So maybe there's some threshold effect with water temp, once you start getting around 10 degrees C, most of the other studies that did show an impairment on muscle hypertrophy were colder.
Most of them generally were in the 5, 10, 15 minute degree range too. Which brings me to another point that if you are getting in say 50 degrees Fahrenheit water for two minutes, I'm guessing here, because we don't have much data on this at all, I don't really think that's going to harm your gains. So again, If you're hanging out in cold water for long periods of time immediately after, maybe, but again, there might be a cutoff in the temperature.
So in this study, 15 degrees centigrade at 15 minutes did not show an effect. In terms of body composition, is hanging out in cold water going to rip fat off you in record time? Nope. In this study? They showed no significant difference between any intervention actually for body composition.
They didn't really show any gains. They didn't show any negative effects. It seems reading between the lines, the athletes did feel better. There was a slight change in some of the performance metrics, but probably not really anything to write home about. Now the thing that's also different is that they, these are athletes who are training most every day.
This was a 12 week study. So we don't know. But we definitely did not see any impairment in the lean body mass. So what they have here, they said, quote DEXA has been strongly correlated as a gold standard for a lean muscle mass assessment. However, it's understood that DEXA is less sensitive to detect changes in lean muscle mass.
So as a result, the use of DEXA alone, without simultaneous assessment using CT or MRI, to investigate the macroscopic changes in lean muscle mass may be considered a limitation of this study. Future research should use site specific macroscopic measurements such as MRI, CT, DEXA changes in lean mass combined with other non invasive adaptation measures to look at muscle architecture.
I also said another potential limitation of the study was utilizing randomized crossover 48 hour washout period between the four week training blocks. So again, all studies are going to have their limitations there too. But this study, eh, didn't really show much of an effect. So again, maybe there is something to temperature.
The study was done at 15 degrees C. A lot of other studies were done at 10 degrees C. Maybe there's something with in season athletes that don't respond the same way. I don't know. So what I have noticed though, working with a fair amount of athletes and other professionals trainers is in season, I could make a pretty good argument to use even hot water or cold water immersion.
If someone has to go out and perform the next day. I don't think it's going to strip all of their muscle off of them. The research on performance is very split. Again, we go through that in the PhysFlex cert, but I can make an argument for in season training that if the athletes like using cold water immersion, which most of them do, they report feeling better.
They report feeling more willingness to train. They feel like they're more recovered, even though if the science is split on it, I'd say, yeah, go for it. If I'm really trying to drive adaptations and it is in off season and their goal is hypertrophy at all cost, would I have them do cold water immersion immediately after training?
In that case, no, I wouldn't. I would actually move it to the morning after cardio sessions. That's normally what I do. There is some data to show that, Cold water immersion post cardio may actually increase cardiovascular benefits. Again, that data is based off of human mechanistic data. We do not have a very solid outcome based trial that I can hang my hat on with that, but that's just me speculating at this point.
It doesn't look like it's going to hamper cardiovascular gains. Most people feel significantly better. So that's how I would use it in the off season. If somebody still wants to use it. The big takeaway here is that the context matters. Are you after all out hypertrophy gains? Are you working with athletes?
Are you looking at more performance and do you like doing cold water immersion or not? We don't have much data saying how long you should wait. The other key part is that most of the studies that have looked at cold water immersion reducing hypertrophy, they are relatively cold, usually 50 degrees or colder, for 10 to 15 minutes.
Most people I know doing cold water immersion are not hanging out in the tank for 10 to 15 minutes. Maybe some are. But they're probably not replicating the exact same parameters of the study. So there you go. I will link to those two studies below. If you want to learn more about cold water immersion, it's just one of the things we cover in the PhysFlex cert, I will put a link to where you can still enroll depending upon when you are listening to this podcast.
If you're listening to this on January 25th, 2024, and it's before midnight Pacific Standard Time, you can still enroll in this round of it. We'll have the link below. I would love to see you there. We've got some cool special bonus items for you also. If you are not able to do it, then the next time it will open will be in fall 2024.
Please add your name to the waitlist below, that'll put you on to the newsletter, you'll get all sorts of other cool free stuff in the meantime. So thank you so much for listening to my little solo cast about the intricacies of cold water immersion, and this is why I personally like doing certifications and teaching methods that way.
Because one, it's hard to interpret all the body of literature that's out there, especially with recovery and things to increase your robustness. And then the context of these things matters. What are your goals? What were the context of the studies? And what do multiple studies say? Because by definition, one study is going to look at a limited set of parameters in order to run said study.
So we need to look at, Multiple studies look at the context of which they were done. So that's why in the PhysFlex cert we've got the overview of why you should be more physiologically flexible. And then we've got the details on, say, cold water immersion, heat true high intensity training, zone 2 training, breath techniques, a bunch of other stuff, expanded fuels, which is lactate and ketones.
And we go into the details of what does the research say, and then we have 40 explicit action items. So you always know exactly how to use the particular data. So you'll understand the context of when it might be useful and when it may actually not be useful, and you'll learn exactly how to go about and do it.
Because if you drop someone into 32 degrees and they're shivering and you tell them to hang out there for five to ten minutes, that's probably not a good place to start. One, you don't need that big of a stimulus. Two, you can run into some issues with after drop and things like that after. And it's really sucks.
Like I've done some cold water immersion, where I've been shivering for a few hours after it's definitely not fun. You usually don't need to go that far either. So just like training, learning the progressions of how to apply it is going to make your life much easier. We'd love to see you in the course.
If you can make it. If not, hope to see you in fall. Thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. And we'll talk to all of you in the next couple days.
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