Quebec Men’s Artistic coaches at the Canadian National Championships told me of a new program being tested.
Boys after Pommel Horse training were daily plunging their hands and wrists into a bucket filled with ice water for up to 5min.
Reports are that chronic wrist pain has been much reduced.
Interesting …
I asked Ed Louie who works with the medical support team of the Canadian Men’s National Team what he thought of the experiment. Ed could not see any downside to the treatment. If it works — great. (He did feel 5min is probably too long.)
I then checked with Anatomy Professor, former Canadian Men’s National Team Coach, Keith Russell. He too was supportive of the experiment and noted that other sports — e.g. Athletics — were using ice plunge as a daily recovery modality.
UPDATE: Dr. Bill Sands, Performance Services – Recovery Center, U.S. Olympic Training Center wrote:
Virtually all of the thermal modalities have one primary mechanism in common: increased blood flow. In the case of ice, there is also a potential for reduction of inflammation (and its concommitant by-products) along with increased blood flow. While ice and other (less) cold modalities have been in use since ancient times, we still find that some people respond well and others do not. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the two years of running our Recovery Center – one size does not fit all. We have a “cold plunge” in our Recovery Center (51 deg F), that athletes use primarilly for legs (since most sports, not gymnastics so much, rely most heavily on legs), but athletes have found that sticking a sore arm or wrist in the cold plunge seems to help them. We also provide ice bags, and of course it is very common to see athletes walking around complex with ice bags wrapped with a clear plastic wrap all the time (they get them from sports medicine).
One of the thornier questions I’m struggling with is where is the line between “rehab” and “recovery.” “Recovery” has become another garbage can term that is now so broadly defined as to have become pretty useless. Are we talking about “healing” something that is injured, or are we talking about returning a “fatigued” athlete to top form more rapidly. Of course, you can get into a fist fight regarding a definition of “fatigue.”
In closing, I would say that ice baths for sore wrists is unlikely to do harm, and may do some good. However, it is important to realize that the body part in the cold must be moved rather continuously to prevent blood pooling. The pooling of blood can ultimately result in some damage to tissues, so the blood has to be kept moving.
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