Why Athletes Ice Bath
- Thomas P Seager, PhD
- Jul 16
- 14 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
The most popular reasons are not the most powerful
Summary
Athletes ice bath for four reasons, ranked from most popular to most powerful:
1) recovery,
2) overuse injury repair,
3) performance, and
4) psychological resilience.
Recovery and injury are the most popular, and the least important.
Performance and psychological resilience -- what athletes call "the mental benefits" is what separates the elite performers from the also-rans.
Popular vs Powerful Reasons to Ice Bath
At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Laura Burns, PhD won a gold medal in Tae Kwon Do for Australia, so naturally when she enrolled in a doctoral degree program at RMIT University in Melbourne, she focused her research on athletic achievement. In particular, Burns wanted to know what separated the medal winners from other great athletes who failed to reach the pinnacle of their sport.
Burns discovered a number of characteristics that the top performers shared, including:
psychological attributes,
strong interpersonal relationships,
performance strategies,
healthy lifestyle practices.
Every single high achieving athlete in her research cohort attributed their success primarily to psychological, rather than physiological attributes, which is consistent with my own findings. I've spoken with several Morozko customers who are elite athletes in multiple professional sports, from several countries, and they all tell me that their mental preparation is more critical than their physical. You can hear them describe it in their own words in the YouTube compilation video at the top of this page.
Fred Warner, NFL
Brent Burns, NHL
Tyler Biadasz, NFL
Triston Casa, MLB
Luke Donald, PGA
Josh Morrisey, NHL
They all agree on the importance of the mental aspects of their sport. Moreover, the same is true for Morozko customers who are super successful in other competitive fields, including entertainment and business. Joe Rogan is the most famous examples. He's talked about the mental benefits of the ice baths on at least a dozen podcasts -- many of them with guests whom he's convinced to buy a Morozko!
And one of most remarkable of Burn's findings was regarding ice baths.
Burns research revealed that the most successful medal-winning competitive athletes practiced ice baths more often than the less successful (Burns et al. 2022).
Given that elite athletes are reporting that the mental characteristics of their preparation and performance are most critical to their success, and that the most successful do the most ice baths, doesn't it make sense to wonder if their are mental benefits to ice baths that are supporting elite athlete success?
In this article I examine the top four reasons why athletes do ice baths, ranked from most popular to most powerful:
1) Ice Bath for Recovery
Learned people, many with advanced degrees and successful careers will tell you that ice baths "help for recovery" and nowawdays you can find so-called "recovery" spas in every major American suburb. If you Google "Why do athletes ice bath," their Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) agent will tell you that it's for recovery after an intense workout.
AI-driven search engines and Large Language Models (LLM) are always popularity contests. That is, they cannot give you the right answer. They can only offer you the most popular answers, and as such they typically perpetuate popular misconceptions.
It is true that doing an ice bath after an intense work will reduce delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). It will reduce pain in joints and muscles, too.
Fall school sports, like American football, will sometimes use ice baths between two-a-day practices during their pre-season, to avoid overheating the students, and to help them prepare for the second practice of the day. What's more, for most athletes, it feels great to have an ice bath when they're sweaty, hot, and tired. But just because it feels good doesn't mean that it helps them compete. One of the most replictaed and robust findings with regard to cold plunge research is that an ice bath after exercise does not improve performance in a following session of exercise (compared to controls). This finding has been repeated in different sports, in men and women, of different ages and states of prior training. In fact, the data suggests that an ice bath after exercise may reduce muscle gains by interrupting the inflammatory process that is the body's adapative response to hormetic stress.
Although many coaches and athletes are counseled to do the ice bath after intense exertion for recovery, the data disagrees. As I wrote in Ice Bath | Exercise | Sauna Has Ancient Ancestral Origins, the likely optimal protocol for recovery is to precool your workout with an ice bath, then use sauna following your workout.
How to Ice Bath for Exercise Recovery
There are advantages to post-exercise ice baths, including a reduced risk of heat exhaustion. In the latter case, whole-body cold water immersion (CWI) is recognized as the fastest way to treat elevated core body temperature. Hot temperatures present a much greater risk to athletes than low and on average between one and two American athletes will die every year from excess heat. In cases of exertional heat stroke, a few minutes in a freezing cold, whole-body ice bath can be life saving.
Under less extreme circumstances, the strongest use case for ice bath for intense exercise recovery in multi-day, warm weather tournament competition. For example, in youth baseball it is common for successful travel teams to play two or three games a day in hot, humid conditions and half a dozen or more games in a single weekend. At a higher level, US Open tennis players might have to play a match every other day to reach the final. In golf, the Ryder Cup requires 36 holes a day, split into morning and afternoon sessions. And of course the ultimate test of human endurance is the Tour de France, which is 23 days of abusing mountain cycling with only two rest days. In each of these cases, an ice bath after competition can make the competitors more comfortable, promote better sleep, reduce soreness, and mentally prepare them to return to competition fast. Use the Guide To Optimal Ice Bath to gauge the duration depending on the temperature of water available. For those sports that principally engage the lower body, such as cycling, soccer and cross-country, athletes will be tempted to immerse only their lower half and they should be permitted to do so. Nonetheless, immersion up to the neck is more likely to activate the dive reflex and engage the parasympathetic division of the central nervous system, which is the rest and digest response essential to recovery from the chronic sympathetic activation of the competition.
2) Overuse Injury Repair with Ice Packs
The second most popular use of cold therapy for athletes in is the treatment of chronic overuse injuries, like tendonitis (e.g., tennis elbow) or carpal tunnel syndrome. Immediately following an acute injury, such as an ankle sprain, inflammation is critical to healing, as the body rushes fluids and resources to the site of the acute injury to speed repair of damaged tissues and an ice pack could be counter-productive. However, in chronic injuries such as result from overuse, the inflammation is too often painful and pointless. Applying cold, such as an ice pack or an ice bath, can help.
Cold stimulation induces vasoconstriction to force fluids away from the inflamed area and reduce pain and swelling. Later, when the tissue rewarms, the fluid that returns will be rich in new resources to power tissues repair. This is the same mechanism by which compression sleeves promote fluid circulation through the body, but ice bath has the advantage of also interrupting pain signals to the brain. A recent review of cryotherapy for soft tissue injuries found that "ice had a positive effect when applied to acute soft tissue injuries. After cryotherapy, most subjects had a decrease in subjective pain ratings, swelling, improved functional mobility, and range of motion" (McKean & Brown 2022).
How to Ice Bath for Injury Repair
The most common practice for soft tissue injuries is to apply ice to the affected area, such as a plastic bag full of crushed ice wrapped around a baseball pitchers' elbow after an extended outing. There are risks associated with this approach, including:
Frostbite. Crushed ice and ice packs are not calibrated for temperature. Prolonged contact with melting ice, or gel packs that cooled to below 30F, can freeze the water inside the athletes skin cells, causing frost nip or frost bite (Coriaty et al. 2015)
Neuropathy (nerve damage). Prolonged contact with cold in an isolated area fo the body can result in a temporary destruction of peripheral nerve function that impairs athletic performance (Babwah 2010). Athletes can often suppress protective pain sensation in an affected area in which they're expecting pain anyway, like a shoulder, elbow, or knee, where they're already experiencing pain. Thus, they are more likely to apply ice packs that are either too cold, or for too long, when other subjects would terminate cold treatment. By contrast, tolerance of whole-body cold water immersion is not subject to the psychological isolation of a single body part and less likely to result in neuropathy because shivering and signs of hypothermia are more likely to terminate the cold session and motivate rewarming.
Non-frostbite cold injury (NFCI). In my article Contraindications to Cold I described how injury to capillaries and micro-blood vessels in the extremities can result from extreme cold exposure. This can be a risk with cold packs, cryotherapy chambers, and ice baths, because all can exposure the fingertips and toes to temperatures that damage blood vessels via extreme vasoconstriction. Typically, remodeling of these microvessels takes about two weeks before the tissue becomes cold tolerant. In that time, the athlete might lose sensation that impairs their performance.
Although cold packs are easier to apply at the site of competition, I prefer whole-body CWI for injury repair or prevention. Immersing the whole body will apply cold to the overuse area and avoid some of the risks cited above. Moreover, my freind Sean Drake, DC cautions that symmetry is essential for maintaining nervous system integrity when treating an overuse injury with cold. That is, many overuse injuries will be in a dominant limb, such as a shoulder, elbow, or wrist associated with a repetitive motion like throwing or spiking a volleyball. When cold is applied to only the dominant limb, the non-dominant limb does not receive the same nerve stimulous and overcompensation for the overuse injury can result. When using ice packs, Drake suggests treating the uninjured counterpart to ensure nerve symmetry is maintained.
3) Precooling for Performance
Ever since Andrew Huberman, PhD had fellow Stanford Professor Craig Heller on his podcast to describe the research on precooling for athletic performance, I've taken for granted that the whole world must already know.
There are massive gains in peak muscle power output and endurance available to competitive athletes using heat extraction either before or during intense exercise.
However, since the podcast, I've interviewed professional athletes from the NFL, MLB, and PGA and none of them were practicing precooling. Hockey players are the occasional exception. After all, it's the only professional sport in which the athletes wear sweaters, and they all seem to know some crazy teammate who will strip down to his jock strap between periods and jump into the dump tank where the Zamboni deposits its ice shavings.
In my article Precool Your Exercise, I reviewed Heller's research and described the data provided by Morozko customers that corroborates it.
In summary, exercise requires mitochondria to produce ATP. As a result of that ATP production, mitochondria also produce byproducts, including reactive oxygen species (ROS) and heat. A little bit of ROS and a little bit of heat is OK. However, when these are produced in excess, they can damage the mitochondrial DNA and require a long recovery and repair period. To prevent that damage, the body experience fatigue, which is the signal that tells the muscles to slow down. Heat extraction keeps the muscles cool, and allows mitochondria to produce more ATP with fewer ROS and less heat -- thus increasing power output and postponing fatigue.
Also, there are hormones like adrenalin and noradrenalin that will override the fatigue impulse in short-term emergencies. That is, under sympathetic nervous system activation (i.e., "flight or fight") release of neurotransmitters and hormones can coax additional performance from the mitochondria until the muscles can get the body back to safety. These are exactly the same chemical that the body produces in response to the cold shock of the ice bath, and they typically stay elevated in the bloodstream for hours after the ice bath. Lastly, in men precooling exercise stimulates testosterone production, which is critical to maintain muscle mass and competitive drive.
How to Precool An Ice Bath for Performance
In precooling, the competitive mindset typical of most athletes can be counter-productive. Longer durations are not better. The mechanism by which precooling increases muscle power is heat extraction and sympathetic activation, not mitobiogenesis.
To precool for performance, use a cold ice bath for a short period of time.
Long sessions in the ice bath prior to competition will put an additional strain on mitochondria by calling them to produce heat for non-shivering thermogenesis. That's the opposite of the desired effect, so keep the precooling protocol to less than 4 minutes at a time.
4) Ice Bath for Psychological Resilience
The most important, and least understood, reason that elite athletes use ice baths is for the mental benefits. This is a consistent finding in my interviews with professional athletes from every sport I've studied so far, and it agrees with Burns research.
The best athletes use the ice bath for the mental benefits.
During the Major League Baseball All-Star break, I spoke to a trainer for an MLB team who gets it. He said that his athletes use the ice bath for the activation of the sympathetic nervous system associated with the dive reflex, and the parasympathetic activation that follows it when the dive reflex takes over. He was the first staff member at the highest professional level who recognizes this
He'd also tested devices for heat extraction during games, including Heller's Cool Mitt device, with which they weren't satisfied. Nonetheless he found that the vagal nerve stimulation of the cold might be the biggest benefit. To get that, he explained they will sometimes use a frozen towel with a menthol linament on the back of the neck, directly over the vagus nerve.
Research shows that parasympathetic tone is critical to athletic performance, especially in relation to performance anxiety (Strumińska et al. 2026). The best physiological measure of the parasympathetic function is called heart rate variability (HRV). It indicates the capacity of the heart to vary the time between beats at the microsecond scale, to meet the changing demands of cognitive and physical performance. As I wrote in Ice Bath vs Cold Plunge for HRV, the key to boosting HRV is plunging at an ice bath temperature cold enough to frighten you.
Clinical data shows that higher HRV separates the highest performing athletes from the next, less successful tier.
Researchers in Armenia conducted a cross-sectional study comparing high-level athletes to those with less success. When they measured HRV in both groups, they discovered that most successful group exhibited HRV measures consistent with less tension and autonomic nervous system activation. Moreover, the less successful group "displayed lower mean values in very low-frequency power (VLF), suggesting reduced activity in thermoregulation and energy exchange centers" (Stepanyan & Lalayan 2023).
This is consistent with Burn's findings that athletes who ice bath more often also win more medals. The Armenian study suggests that there could be two reasons for it:
improvement in parasympathetic tone resulting from a regular whole-body CWI practice, and
better thermoregulatory and energy system management as a consequence of the regular hormetic stress of the cold.
One of the most controversial aspects of the ice bath is the claim that somehow colder might be better. When Gary Bracka appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast to say "I haven't seen any evidence that colder is better," Joe's response was "It sucks worse and that's why I like it."
Rogan is correct for performance. The studies that Brecka is citing never looked at HRV or the nervous system benefits of the ice bath. They only examined the metabolic.
When an athlete who is preparing for an ice bath looks down at the water and sees floating chunks of ice, the visual image activates their nervous system response even before they step into the water. This is a phenomenon called "anticipatory thermogenesis," which is a term coined by the South African Physician and Scientist Tim Noakes, MD/PhD when he was supervising Lewis Pugh's record-breaking Antarctic Ocean swim. Noakes noticed that Pugh's core body temperature begin to rise before Pugh entered the water.
The internal organ most responsible for generating heat in the cold without shivering is called brown adipose tissue (BAT, or brown fat). Unlike white fat, BAT is highly innervated, meaning that there are lots of nerves between the fat cells. They serve to activate the fat with signals that come directly from the brain via the sympathetic nervous system.
When Pugh was getting ready to enter the cold Antarctic water, his brain began signaling his brown fat to produce heat even before the temperature sensors in his skin could signal his hypothalamus. That's why Noakes called his reaction anticipatory.
For experienced cold plungers, the visual of the ice floating in the water is sufficient to do the same anticipatory signaling as Pugh experienced. That is, the sympathetic activation starts even before the cold does. This is why Rogan told Matthew McConaughey "every morning I almost don't get in."
When the ice bath is cold enough to create that sympathetic activation, the athlete will experience a pendulation between the sympathetic gasp reflex and the parasympathetic dive reflex that is like a workout for their central nervous system. That pendulation improves their parasympathetic tone, boosts the HRV, and better prepares them for the stress of competition.
THAT is the most important reason that athletes ice bath.
How to Ice Bath for Psychological Benefits
The most important thing is to plunge at a temperature that initiates the gasp reflex. If the water doesn't scare you, or it's boring, then it's not cold enough.
In my experience, no one gets so accustomed to 33F freezing cold water. Not me, not Rogan, and certainly not Huberman. In a podcast with David Goggins, Huberman revealed what he called "one of the most important discoveries that neuroscience has ever made." As I explained in Cold Plunge for Competition, Huberman emphasized the importance of doing hard things that you hate doing, to maintain a brain structure called the anterior midcingulate cortex (AMCC) -- the region of the brain he says some scientists called the "seat of the will to live."
Huberman says the AMCC is typically larger in athletes than in the general population, presumably because of all the difficult training they do. What that suggests is that to ice bath for mental benefits, it's essential for athletes to choose temperature cold enough for them to hate so much that they almost do NOT get in the ice bath.
What is not important is staying in long enough to shiver.
When ice bathing for mental benefits, follow these simple instructions:
Set the ice bath temperature to freezing cold -- 33F.
Enter feet first and submerge all the way to the neck. if you're going to dunk your head, do it now, not at the end of your plunge.
Catch your breath and structure your breathing. Take control of your breath.
Going in and out through your nose, lengthen your breath. Let your heart rate drop and your brain calm down.
Count six or seven long, slow, controlled breaths, which is long enough to ensure the dive reflex has kicked in.
Get out.
Do three minutes of light exercise (lunges, steel mace, squats, steps, push ups, jump rope) for every one minute of cold.
Do not linger too long in the ice bath. Just two to four minutes is sufficient.
References
Babwah T. Common peroneal neuropathy related to cryotherapy and compression in a footballer. Research in Sports Medicine. 2010 Dec 30;19(1):66-71.
Burns L, Weissensteiner JR, Cohen M, Bird SR. A survey of elite and pre-elite athletes’ perceptions of key support, lifestyle and performance factors. BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2022 Dec;14(1):2.
Coriaty N, Shah K, Cheng A. Cryotherapy: A Review of Methods, Applications, and Dangers for Treating Soft Tissue Injury. NATIONAL FOOT & ANKLE REVIEW: 55. 2015-2016.
McKean KM, Brown CM. Treatment of Acute Soft-Tissue Injury Using Ice: A Systematic Review. Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University; 2022.
Stepanyan L, Lalayan G. Heart rate variability features and their impact on athletes' sports performance. Journal of Physical Education and Sport. 2023 Aug 1;23(8):2156-63.
Strumińska J, Nowosielska-Ogórek A, Śmigielska M, Janczak S, Węgrzyn T. Cardiovascular Autonomic Regulation and Performance Anxiety in Athletes: A Narrative Review. Quality in Sport. 2026 Jun 14;58:72696-.
About the Author
Thomas P Seager, PhD is an Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. Seager co-founded the Morozko Forge ice bath company and is an expert in the use of ice baths for building metabolic and psychological resilience.
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