Ice Baths for Runners: What I Got Wrong (and What the Science Actually Says)

Ice bath for runners — does cold water immersion actually help recovery, or is it just marketing hype? In this episode, I dig into the peer-reviewed research to find out and answer the questions every runner has but nobody seems to address.

For about 15 years, I thought I had ice baths figured out. Then in the span of a few months, I heard I might be doing them at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons — and that they might even be working against my own training. So I went looking for answers, and they were a lot harder to find than I expected.

This episode is one of the questions that made me start this podcast in the first place. Everybody talks about cold plunging and ice baths — but nobody seems to stop and answer the basic questions a runner actually has.

In this episode I cover:

• Is there even a difference between an ice bath and a cold plunge?

• Does cold water immersion really help with recovery?

• Will it kill your gains? (Spoiler: not for runners — and I explain why)

• When should you do it — in the morning, or after your run?

• How cold should the water be, and how long should you stay in?

• Do you need your whole body in, or are legs enough?

• How does cold compare to heat, contrast therapy, and active recovery?

I'm not a scientist or a doctor — I'm just a curious runner who can read and use the internet. I leaned on peer-reviewed studies for the facts and tried to translate what I found into something useful for runners of all levels, from beginner to marathoner.

If this episode gave you some value, the biggest thing you can do to help the show is hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss the next one. New episodes drop every other Friday.

Until next time — Just Keep Running.

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Until Next Time: Just Keep Running

Transcript

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So for about 15 years, I thought that I had ice baths all figured out. And then in the span of just a few months, I found out that I might be doing them wrong, like for the wrong reasons at the wrong time, and that they might even be hurting the training that I was doing. I was pretty confused, so I went looking for answers. And it turned out that they were a lot harder to find than I thought. But before we get into all that, let's back up a little bit. Because this story starts back when I was in college with a friend of mine, back in our fitness center, with a tub of ice and me not asking a single question. So back to each college, I had this friend that I used to work out with quite a bit, and he started telling me about how great ice baths were. So our college had um just built this new wellness center, and they had a really nice training room and uh recovery room in it. Um had these professional style stainless steel tanks that you see like Pro Sports teams using with uh water circulators, and they had a big ice machine so you could fill the tubs up with as much ice as you want. And him and I would go in there and take ice baths after we worked out, and then sometimes we'd even do um hot cold. We'd fill one tub with hot, one tub with cold, and then every two minutes we would switch tubs back and forth. So we'd do two minutes hot, two minutes cold uh for about 20 minutes. And it always seemed to help me feel a lot better. And I knew that professional sports teams did this. I'd see YouTube videos of athletes doing it, and I never really put all that much thought into it. I just thought, well, if these big strong athletes who get paid millions of dollars to use their body are doing it, then it must be the right thing to do. And that was pretty much the end of it for me. So fast forward to just last year, and I get back into running, start building mileage. Every time my legs would get sore, if I felt like I needed it, I would take an ice bath, just like I used to do in college. And again, it seemed to help. And of course, you get back into running, you start looking at more fitness stuff, your algorithms on all your social media start showing you all these different people talking about health trends, and I start seeing how cold plunging is the best and taking ice baths is the best and all that sort of thing. And everybody's talking about how great it is. And I'm thinking to myself, well, yeah, obviously, like I've known that for years. Like, doesn't everybody know that? Isn't that just obvious? So then I start to hear the exact opposite thing on a podcast one time. I hear them talking about how uh taking an ice bath or a cold plunge after you work out will actually hinder your gains and that it stops muscle growth and that it's not good for recovery. And then I was like, well, wait a minute, I thought I was doing this for recovery. I thought that was the whole point. What are you talking about? Then I started hearing people refer to ice baths and cold plunges, and you should do it after you work out or you should not do it after you work out, you should do it in the morning. And it's really all about metabolic benefits and losing weight, and then some people were saying it's great for recovery. And I was just very confused by the whole thing, and I couldn't even get a straight answer on whether an ice bath and a cold plunge were the same thing. It seemed like people kept using those terms slightly differently, but mostly interchangeably, but I didn't know if they were the same thing or not. So now this one simple habit that I've had for a little over 15 years now that I just always took blindly as a good thing was in complete doubt, and I had no idea what I was even doing. So again, like I said, when I went to look for answers for myself, I heard all kinds of people talking about it, but it it was just more confusing the more people I heard talk about it, and the answers were actually more difficult to find than I ever would have imagined. And oddly enough, that's actually one of the reasons that this podcast exists is because a whole bunch of people were talking about ice paths, but nobody was answering the questions that I had about them. Maybe they all just thought that my questions were too stupid to ask, but that didn't change the fact that I still had them. And I assumed that since I had these questions, other people probably do too. So I went looking for some answers. It did take me quite a bit of work, but thankfully I did find some answers, and we're gonna go through them today. Starting with the one that really annoyed me the most. Is a cold plunge in an ice bath even the same thing? When I looked for answers, I went in search of actual scientific literature. I didn't want to just find random magazine articles and blog posts and things like that. Of course, I did come across some of those, and I'm sure they helped color my opinion a little bit, but I tried to lean on actual scientific literature, like peer-reviewed studies, to base any of the findings that I'm gonna share with you here today. I did find some genuinely useful information, and that's what I'm gonna share with you today, but just keep in mind this is just information, and again, I'm not a doctor, so I'm not gonna tell you what to do with it. Just take the information and apply it however you see fit for your life. So with that, is there a difference between a cold plunge and an ice bath? Nope, not at all. As a matter of fact, you won't find either of those terms in the scientific literature. What scientists refer to is cold water immersion, which is just the act of putting your body or part of your body in cold water. Simple as that. Ice baths and cold plunges are more like industry jargon, uh, mostly from the wellness and um health influencer industries. So they're not reflected in the scientific literature and they don't really matter because they are essentially all referring to the same thing. But just to kind of keep all of our terminology straight, I'm gonna try as much as possible not to refer to either of them, um, unless I'm referring to people pushing one specific thing. Uh, but for our sort of little informational study here, I'm gonna try to avoid using those terms and just stick with what the scientific literature says, which is cold water immersion or sometimes just abbreviated CWI. All right, now that we've got that straight, let's dig into why this stuff is so confusing and what had me searching for all of these answers myself. So, first, I heard that cold water immersion after exercise would help with soreness. And it turns out that the literature does back that up to a certain extent. Uh, pretty regularly and consistently throughout the literature, athletes do um say that they feel better and that they feel less sore the day after they use cold water immersion post-exercise. But then I also started finding this information that there's no biological mechanism that leads to this benefit in soreness. And in fact, when scientists look for the inflammation markers in the muscles that would reduce soreness, they don't find any improvement there. So we get this weird situation where athletes are claiming, and obviously this is a subjective measurement, but it is very repeatable and it's pretty predictable that the athletes claim they feel better the day after cold water immersion, but the scientists can't figure out why and they can't find the mechanism for it. From the studies that I was able to find and look at myself, um, the only thing scientists were able to find that did improve was that lactate did seem to reduce using cold water immersion. But CRP and IL6, which are two of the inflammatory markers that they track that correlate with uh soreness, those didn't improve. So again, it's this other weird scenario where he part of the puzzle is pointing to cold water immersion helping with the soreness, but then some of the things that they're using to track that soreness in a more objective manner are not really correlating with that. So then I found some more literature that does point to the fact that cold water immersion after exercise does hinder your muscle gains. Turns out that it uh slows down hypertrophy and can actually blunt gains after exercise. So now I'm even more confused, right? Because if it's supposed to help with soreness, and that's kind of the whole point of doing it, as far as I understood it, why would it be hurting your gains and stopping your muscles from rebuilding? It didn't make any sense. And then I kept hearing certain people say that if you're going to use cold water immersion, most of these people were referring to it as cold plunging at this point, were saying that you have to do it first thing in the morning right away, and you want to do it before you exercise, not after you exercise. So then I keep digging, keep finding more studies, and I find that cold water immersion actually does help with joint pain and that it helps inflammatory markers go down in your joints. So now I'm even more confused because I just read some studies that said it doesn't help inflammatory markers go down. So now I hope that you can see why I was so confused and why I had to go trying to figure this out for myself. So now that we've kind of figured out why this stuff is so messy, let's see if we can try to figure out a coherent explanation for what might actually be going on here. So I think that I did come up with a fairly logical explanation for what's happening here. Uh, but I don't want you to just take my word for it. I'm gonna walk through what I came up with and what I'm thinking, and that way you can evaluate it for yourself and you can take it or leave it. So let's start by looking at the three things that really seemed to clash with each other the most. You had these studies that were looking at the muscles specifically, and they were unable to find inflammatory markers going down. The only thing they could find was lactate going down. Then you had these other studies that were looking at joint pain specifically, and they were able to track inflammatory markers going down in those studies. And on top of that, you had the athletes claiming that they feel better. Again, pretty reliably across the literature. Athletes claim that they feel better, feel less sore the day after cold water immersion. So if we can't find inflammatory markers improving in the muscles, we can find that in the joints, and athletes feel better pretty much across the board. What's going on here? So here's the thing that I found that finally started making things click and honestly started making me feel like there was hope to get answers here. It turns out that the studies that were looking at inflammatory markers in the muscles and the ones that were looking at inflammatory markers in the joints were looking at different inflammation markers altogether. So not only are they looking in different locations, one's looking at the muscles, one's looking at the joints, they're also looking for different markers. And once I realized that, I realized, okay, so these studies aren't conflicting with each other. They're just each answering different questions and they're looking at a very narrow slice of the pie, so to speak. And even in the studies where they weren't able to find the inflation markers going down, sorry, inflammation markers going down in the muscles, the athletes they were studying did still report that they felt better the next day. Again, that's pretty reliable. And you look at the fact that they're looking at different things, and the lactate does improve in the studies looking at just the muscles. So my assumption is that some of the soreness relief comes from that improvement in lactate clearing, and some of the improvement is coming from the inflammatory markers in the joints specifically. So some of it might be joint-related, some of it might be muscular related. And to be honest, there could even be more things that either I didn't find or that the literature hasn't really focused on yet. So now let's deal with the other big confusion I had and the thing that might even be more of an issue. The stuff about cold water immersion killing your gains if you do it after exercise. That was another thing that I really wanted to dig into, and I couldn't really figure out for a little while what was going on until I found some studies that specifically addressed what was happening here. And the way that I understand it, what this confusion really comes down to is that the effects in your body that go into building bigger muscles, especially after like heavy weight training, are different than the mechanisms that go into recovery and adaptation for things like endurance athletics, things like cycling and running and things of that nature. And at its core, that's really where this confusion comes from. So when you lift heavy, the way you actually get bigger and stronger is that your body kicks off this whole sequence of things that starts with these uh basically little muscle builder cells that get flipped on and they start the process of rebuilding muscle. Your body tells them, hey, we need more muscle, they go to work and they start building more muscle. And it turns out that cold water immersion right after a heavy lifting session like that kind of quiets this whole process down. And the literature on that is pretty clear. There's several studies that prove that cold water immersion right after this type of heavy lifting for muscle building and strength gains does actually hinder that process. It turns out that they've tracked this over weeks and they have seen significant differences in both muscle and strength gains over several weeks. So this one is pretty well supported. But here's the thing that whole building new muscle mechanism that we just talked about doesn't really apply to people who are looking for gains as endurance athletes. Endurance athletes' adaptations primarily come from the body building new small uh blood vessels, which is called capillarization, and also you're building more mitochondria, which are basically the little tiny engines in your cells that provide power and allow you to keep going for mile after mile. So while it is true that the cold water immersion quiets down those signals that the muscle building system needs, it mostly leaves alone the adaptations that we as endurance athletes need to keep improving. So it's basically two different systems using two different mechanisms and getting two different results. And it turns out that that's exactly what the studies show. Again, uh multiple studies very reliably point to cold water immersion quieting down and slowing down that muscle building recovery after an intense strength training session. But the literature on whether it hurts endurance athletes is mixed at best. And in fact, one study found no harm whatsoever to endurance athletes who did use cold water immersion. It didn't seem to blunt any adaptations or improvement at all. And unless you're trying to look like the rock, it's really not our concern at all as endurance athletes. One other thing that I did want to mention here is that a lot of the cold plunge, do it first thing in the morning marketing also revolves around uh improving your metabolism and weight loss. And I just want to be clear that is not really something that I looked into a lot in this journey. That wasn't my primary concern. It's kind of beyond the scope of this episode here. So the science that I looked at centered specifically around exercise and running, and all of it revolved around doing cold water immersion after exercise. So I'm not gonna say one way or the other if any of those, you know, cold plunge first thing in the morning and you're gonna lose a bunch of weight claims are true or false. Uh that's just not something that I dug into. But if you do do that and you believe it helps, then by all means keep doing it, right? Everybody's different, everybody's body is different. So if you think that that's helping you, then go for it. Uh, I'm not trying to shut anybody down or tell you not to do anything that you think works. So now that we have those answers out of the way and we realize that for us as runners and endurance athletes, there's a real benefit to using cold water immersion. I was still left with the questions of how to do it. Specifically, how cold should it be? How long should I be in there for, and do I have to get my whole body in the water to see these benefits, or is it okay if I can only fit my legs in the water? So let's break down what the literature and my own experience tell us about this stuff. So, temp and time are one of the things that's pretty well supported in the literature. I found several studies that point to 10 to 15 minutes being the optimal range for soreness relief. I was doing it for 20 minutes at a time before I started doing this research. So that's one of the things that I've actually had to adjust since learning all the stuff that I've learned in this process. Now I just stick with 15 minutes. And as far as the temperature range goes, this was a little wider, but also pretty well verified. Uh basically it's anywhere from 41 to 59 degrees. And most of the soreness benefits are available at the upper end of that, basically from 50 degrees and up. Some of the inflammatory markers that they found in the joints and things like that improved more with the colder temps as you got closer to closer to that 41 degree range, but it's not really buying you any more benefit on the soreness front. And as far as the temperature goes, I was actually pretty much nailing that without even realizing it. Um I just filled my tub up with cold water and I put a little Tupperware container that I freeze in my freezer right in there. And um, after I did some of this research, I did a little test with a meat thermometer from our kitchen, because you know, I'm super high-tech lab around here. So I just stuck my meat thermometer in the tub. But it turns out I was right around 50 degrees. So that was actually pretty cool. I was right in the middle of that window, so that worked out well for me. As for the how soon after running question goes, the literature points to soon-ish after you run. It doesn't have to be immediate, but the science does kind of want you to be in that post-run window, which is right around an hour after you finish running. But I don't think this is nearly as hard and fast of a rule as the time and temperature. Uh, just from my personal experience, there's been several times where I finish a run and life gets in the way between work and kids and everything, and I'm not able to get in the tub for a few hours after a run. And I do still notice some benefit, probably not as much benefit as a quick hitter where I just get done my run and get right in the ice bath. That definitely seems to help more, but I do still notice some benefit. So the answer to this one is basically try to get it done as soon-ish as you can after your run, but don't stress about it too much. You don't have to set a timer the second you stop running and make sure you're in the ice water, you know, at a specific time. Just get it done basically as soon as you can, and the sooner the better. Now let's talk about another one that I was really concerned about. Do I need to get my whole body in the water or is just my legs enough? And the good news here is that I was actually able to find some science to answer this exact question. I was able to find a pretty recent study from just in 2026 that looked at this exact thing and they found that there was no difference in submerging your entire body or just submerging the areas that you worked. Whether it was after an arm workout and you just do your arm or a leg workout and you just do your legs, they weren't able to find any difference. So for us runners, you're basically just looking at the waist down. Now, I did find a separate study that was a meta-analysis, and their conclusion was that whole water immersion was about 5% more effective than partial body immersion. But that study was looking at a much broader scope of things. They were focusing on things like bringing down your core temperature and improving your sleep scores. So it was not just looking at uh muscle soreness and muscle recovery. So for us runners who are primarily just worried about sore legs after a run, uh, like I said, waist down is probably fine for us. But you might get some additional benefit if you can get your whole body in. For me personally, uh my bathtub only goes deep enough for me to get just above my belly button, and that's always worked fine for me. Um like I said, it it always seems to make me feel better. So that's what I do personally. But if you do have the ability, if you know, if you have a really deep tub and you can get deeper than that, I would say maybe try it and see how it feels. Again, everybody's body is different, so maybe you'll react better to that. Um but I wouldn't stress about it. I don't think you need to go buy some fancy uh $5,000 cold plunging tub or whatever. Like I said, I'm not doing anything real fancy here. It's just my bathtub and a Tupperware of ice that I throw in the freezer every night. So I'm not stressing about it that much, and I don't think you really need to either. As long as you can get your legs in the cold water, I think it's gonna help. So another question that kept coming up when I was researching this stuff was what about hot? Should I be doing cold or should I be doing hot? And it's another one where it was a little bit difficult to get a straight answer because the real answer is it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But once you understand what they both do, you start to realize that they're both good, but they're just used at different times and for different purposes. So it's not a situation where it's one versus the other. Cold water immersion is great for the post-run soreness stuff that we've already talked about here. And an additional use case for cold water immersion is lowering your body temperature before an extremely hot race. And in this case, uh there were some studies done where they used cold water immersion to bring down people's core temps before extremely hot, long endurance races, and they were able to find some performance benefits. But just to be clear, that is a very specific use case. And under normal conditions at normal temperature, there was no benefit whatsoever to doing that. And likewise, if uh heat is not a concern before your race or before your run or whatever you plan on doing, um, heat can actually be used to help loosen up your muscles and improve blood flow before an event. So cold or sorry, hot water immersion could be beneficial in that situation. Um, say you've got a long drive before a run or a race or something, if you have the opportunity to apply some heat to your muscles, it can actually start to loosen up the muscles and increase blood flow in that situation. And if you remember back to the story with my buddy and I in college where we would uh do one tub hot and one tub cold, I did find some literature that says that that can be extremely beneficial as well. Unfortunately, I don't have that type of setup anymore. I just have my plain old bathtub now. Uh so I'm not really able to experiment with that in my return to running journey that I'm going on now. But um there is some support for that as well as another use case for hot and cold. So the answer to the whole should I use heat or should I use cold thing is not a yes to this and no to that type thing. They're more uh complementary pieces to the puzzle, and I like to look at them both as tools that you have available in your toolbox. You just need to know how to use them and when to use them properly. And speaking of tools that you have in your toolbox, let's talk about another one that again is not competing with cold water immersion, and that would be active recovery. People ask this one a lot. Uh, they'll say something along the lines of, do I really need to do cold water immersion? I really don't feel like it. And is there any reason to do that when active recovery is an option? Again, these are two different things, and they're both used for two different purposes. And just so we're on the same page here, active recovery includes things like walking, yoga, swimming, uh, very easy cycling, and even light jogging. And just before we move on here, I want to be clear that light jogging is only active recovery if it is genuinely easy for you. So for me, it would really not count. Uh, as a more beginner runner, I would not consider jogging active recovery. Um for it to be considered active recovery, you need to be able to carry on a full conversation, just like you're sitting on the couch in the living room, basically. If you can't do that or you don't feel like it's extremely easy for you to carry on that jog, then you should slow down to a walk. Um if recovery is the goal, then the pace needs to be extremely slow and it needs to be a very easy activity for you. So what is active recovery actually doing? Turns out it's doing a couple of things. Uh when it's done for six to ten minutes immediately following an exercise, it can help you bring your heart rate down in a controlled way, and it also improves circulation and blood flow. It can also be done the day after a race or a hard effort, or for several days after a race or hard effort, and it continues to improve blood flow, uh, increase circulation, and it can help keep your muscles from getting too tight from inactivity. Though after a truly brutal race or workout, your body might need a full day of just uh doing nothing. And if that's what your body needs, that's perfectly fine. You don't need to feel like you have to get it in the day after a race or anything like that. Uh listen to your body and just know that, again, just like everything else uh with the hot and cold here, it is another tool you have available to you. It's not something that's competing with cold water immersion or replacing cold water immersion. It's just another tool you have in your toolbox. And uh the more you know about it, the better you'll be able to use it to help aid you in your recovery. All right, we've covered quite a bit here. So let's take a quick look at where we're at and what we've covered. First off, a cold plunge and an ice bath are both just cold water immersion as far as a scientist is concerned. It's just marketing and it's basically a distinction without a difference. So don't worry about that one. And for us as runners, the stuff you hear about cold water immersion killing gains and not be good to do right after an exercise uh really doesn't apply to us. That's not something we have to worry about. It genuinely does help with soreness, even if the literature can't point to one specific thing and say this is why and we know it for a fact. Um, that might be a little bit murkier, but it is very clear that it does help and it definitely eases soreness. And when you want to DIY it and go ahead and apply these things that we've talked about today, uh remember to keep it simple, 10 to 15 minutes. I happen to prefer 15 minutes in the 50-ish degree ballpark. Um, if you're a little over, a little under, don't worry about it. And if you can get your whole legs in there up to about your belly button, that's fine. If you can get more in and you can tolerate it, go for it, but it's not really necessary. And try to do it soon-ish after your run. Again, don't freak out about it, but just try to get it in soon-ish after your run. And don't feel the need to go buy a bunch of fancy equipment or do anything special. Keep it simple. For the most part, just stuff you have around your house will probably work fine. And finally, cold water immersion is just one tool that you have in your toolbox when it comes to recovery. Uh, you need to know how and when to use it, which now you should, and you need to know how and when to use the others as well. So keep learning and keep using those tools when they're appropriate. Man, I had a lot of fun putting this episode together. Um, had a bunch of fun doing the research, and uh, my hope is that it really did help you and gave you some things that you can take away and actually use in your life and hopefully improve your running journey a little bit. Um, if that's the case or if you got anything out of this episode, if you could do me a huge favor and either follow or subscribe, depending on whatever platform you're on, that would be uh a great help to me. And I'm gonna be coming out with more educational and inspirational content like this every other Friday, and I don't want you to miss any of it. And until next time, just keep running.