Ice baths or cold showers should be avoided within six hours of training sessions focused on hypertrophy or strength to allow for beneficial inflammatory adaptations.

“I wouldn't do it, I guess is the most blunt way to put it. If you're like hey, like I'm not super concerned with growing muscle, and I want these other things that come with cold water immersion, fine. It's not zero, it's not taking you backwards.”

“there is evidence that doing deliberate cold exposure not so much in the form of a cold shower but in the form of a um submersion up to the neck post strength or resistance training say in the four but probably the eight hours after resistance training because of the attenuation of the inflammatory response which sounds like a great thing it actually can inhibit some of the strength and hypertrophy gains that one would otherwise experience”

“cold water imers ver in the you know 4 to 8 hours after resistance training can limit some of the hypertrophy and strength gains from resistance training because what you're inducing when you actually go into the gym is the that leads to the hypertrophy and strength training is an inflammation response that triggers the compensation right or um or the hyper compensation”

“what you hinted at is the same reasons why we don't ice injuries because it limits our body's ability to to heal so it rate limits and it might do it by phasal constriction”

“If you're getting into the ice bath after doing resistance training, you are likely short-circuiting the improvements that you're trying to create.”

“however when you're doing strength training if you're lifting weights um something that you're wanting to cause muscle hypertrophy then it's been shown doing cold water immersion in immediately after that um is not good because immediately after strength training there's inflammation that's that occurs and that inflammation is very important to as a hormetic response to activate all these anti-inflammatory Pathways and also um it's important to um activate some immune cells that play a role in producing igf-1 and muscle tissue which helps you you know make your mus grow basically it helps you with hypertrophy so um doing cold water immersion within an hour after strength training is um has been shown to be deleterious on muscle hypertrophy”

“I do think that using it frequently, probably, if your goal is optimizing muscle growth, not a good thing. Timing might be a concern. So, if you want to do that, probably spacing it out at long periods after. But then you might not get the benefit you want. Like, if you're sore, you're going to want to be doing it when you're sore. So, if you're sore the following day, yeah, I think that might be beneficial where you've kind of gotten out of your window, or at least gotten the majority of your protein synthetic responses in.”

“there is emerging evidence that it actually has negative effects, particularly on hypertrophy but on strength measures as well. Somewhat limited evidence, but it's been shown there's triangulation of evidence, meaning that we have acute data that shows it blunts intracellular anabolic signaling, that it blunts muscle protein synthesis, satellite cell. When you talk about anabolic signaling, the pro-inflammatory response, which, on one end, is why, quote unquote, it helps with recovery but the acute pro-inflammatory response actually has been shown to have a positive effect on muscle development.”

“so we did a study where we used the intrinsic labeled protein so we could track where the protein goes uh acutely but also more longterm and after exercise we put One lag in cold water and one in Thon neutral water and we saw that the lag in the cold water did not get the same stimulation of muscle protein synthesis and basically less of the protein would actually go to the lag less profusion less stimulation of muscle protein synthesis”