The core pitch here is elegant: whole-body cryotherapy gives you the physiological effects of an ice bath in two to three minutes, without the misery of sitting in one. Skylar and Brittany built a business on that premise. They took it to Shark Tank, made it accessible, and reframed cold therapy as something for everyoneānot just athletes with a team trainer and a bathtub full of ice.
That claim is largely true. When dry nitrogen drops ambient temperature to around negative 250 degrees Fahrenheit, your skin surface cools rapidly, triggering vasoconstriction and a sympathetic nervous system response. Blood retreats to protect your core. Inflammatory markers drop. When you step out, that blood floods back to your extremities carrying oxygen and nutrients. The anti-inflammatory cascade is real.
A 2024 study on cryotherapy and active recovery in athletes found meaningful improvements in post-match physiological variables. But here's what most facilities won't tell you: in whole-body cryotherapy, your core temperature largely doesn't drop. Your skin gets the cold signal. Your organs stay warm. That's a fundamentally different stimulus than cold water immersion, where you actually lose core heat. The effects overlapābut they're not identical. Nathan McKen said it plainly in another interview in this knowledge base: "Cryotherapy is still a brand new thing, and there's a lot of research going on." That honesty is rarer than it should be in this space.
The most striking data I've seen on cryotherapy isn't about muscle sorenessāit's about mental health. A 2019 clinical methodology paper found a 66.4% decrease in asthenic disorders and an 82.8% reduction in neuro-mental tension in individuals with borderline mental health conditions. Those numbers are not subtle. The mechanism tracks: the cold shock triggers a norepinephrine surge, endorphin release, a brief dynorphin cascade that sensitizes your opioid receptors. You walk out of a two-minute session chemically different than you walked in. Facilities almost never lead with this.
If you're already doing cold showers or plunges, whole-body cryotherapy is a reasonable complementānot a replacement. The controlled environment makes consistency easier. The cost makes it less accessible than a cold shower but more accessible than a home cold plunge setup. Three sessions per week is the threshold where the research starts showing cumulative benefit. One session is a curiosity. Three per week, consistently, is a protocol.
Thermovision researchāusing infrared thermal imaging to track skin temperature distribution during sessionsāconfirmed that while heart rate and blood pressure shift meaningfully, all values stayed within safe physiological ranges. What that tells us is the body is doing exactly what it's designed to do under cold stress. The response is calibrated. Ancient. Your nervous system has been handling cold exposure since before we had a name for it. The machine just makes it repeatable, measurable, and dry. That's the real innovation hereānot the cold itself, but the consistency it enables.