Cryotherapy, At Minus 166 Degrees, Choice of Elite Athletes

Here's another idea the wife is unlikely to go for: standing for three minutes in a chamber chilled to -166 degrees Fahrenheit after the daily workout.  Yet acccording to the New York Times, that is the recovery method of choice for a growing number of elite soccer players, rugby teams, professional cyclists and track and field athletes in the United States and Europe. Talk about takin "chill out" too seriously. The paper reports that cryotherapy chambers were originally intended to treat certain medical conditions, but athletes soon adopted the technology in hopes that supra-subzero temperatures would help them to recover from strenuous workouts more rapidly. It also reports that there is little evidence that they work. But, curiously, there is some: one study published in July in the Public Library of Science One, involved a group of trained runners who did a simulated 48-minute trail run on a treadmill. Afterward, half of the runners entered a whole-body cryotherapy chamber once a day for five days. The Times reports that from the first day, the runners who’d entered the chamber showed fewer blood markers of inflammation than the group who had recovered by sitting quietly. The good news, the researcher say, is that the therapy could  “save two to three days” of training time, and allow tired athletes could return to hard training sooner. The bad news is that they would also return to cryotherapy sooner.

Read more in the New York Times.