Get An Ice Bath To Ice Your Muscles
Whenever your muscles are feeling a bit sore or overworked, you should remember my motto, “Ice Early, Ice Often.” Your body is very good at telling you when something is wrong; the trick is learning how to distinguish between the minor tears that are a normal part of your training process and the major tears that could lead to an injury. Arguably the most effective way to do ice your muscles is to immerse your muscles in an ice bath. It may not be the most economical way to ice yourself, but it can cover a wide area of your body with little additional effort.
An ice bath can consist of using a full sized whirlpool type contraption or just dumping a bag of ice into a bucket of water. With a bucket, you can immerse your feet. With a full whirlpool, you can immerse as much of your body as you want to. In general, you should not immerse more of your body than you have to in order to completely cover the sore muscles in water. Somebody that is new to using an ice bath will probably not be able to stay immersed for more than a minute or two. As you get used to it, though, you will be able to increase your immersion up to 5 or 10 minutes. You should never stay immersed for more than 10 minutes at a time or you may become susceptible to frostbite cold water therapy tub.
The theory behind the ice bath is that your muscles constrict and the blood flow is diverted to your deeper muscles close to the bone to keep them safe in the extreme temperature. When you take your leg or body out of the ice bath, fresh blood rushes back into your muscles that does not have any of the chemicals released by your muscles as you ripped and tore them during exercise, such as lactic acid. This helps to speed up the healing process.
In general, using an ice bath is a one time event that should be done as soon after your workout as possible. Once you get out, you should do some gentle stretching and warm your muscles back up. You do not want to get back into your ice bath until after the next time that you exercise, so unlike using an ice bag or giving yourself an ice massage, you’ll never do multiple rounds of icing at any given time.
