This article makes a claim that a lot of people in the recovery space don't want to hear: cryotherapy is probably oversold. Not useless — but oversold. The core argument is that while cold treatments reliably reduce delayed onset muscle soreness, they don't meaningfully move the needle on the markers we actually care about: lactate clearance, muscle damage repair, functional recovery. And in certain contexts, they may actively work against you.
That last part is where it gets interesting. Cold exposure after strength training doesn't just reduce soreness — it blunts the inflammatory signal that drives adaptation. Inflammation isn't just damage. It's a signal. It tells your muscle cells to rebuild stronger. When you aggressively suppress that signal with cold, you're not accelerating recovery. You're interrupting a conversation your body is trying to have with itself.
The knowledge base has several papers that add important texture here. A 2024 paper on cryotherapy for soft tissue injuries reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle: cold is most valuable in the acute window — the first 48 hours after injury — when your goal is to manage swelling and pain, not to drive adaptation. After that window, prolonged cold use may interfere with the healing processes you actually need. A separate 2024 paper comparing cryotherapy and heat for tendon injuries echoes this: cold for acute inflammation, heat for chronic recovery and tissue remodeling. The protocols aren't interchangeable. The timing changes everything.
What's consistently agreed upon across the literature is that cold water immersion outperforms whole body cryotherapy when you're comparing the two head-to-head. The physiology makes sense — immersion provides uniform contact, better thermal conductivity, and hydrostatic pressure that may assist with fluid redistribution. Sitting in a cold room for three minutes doesn't replicate any of that. If you're going to use cold for recovery, the ice bath is the more defensible choice.
The real friction in this field is between recovery and adaptation. Clinicians focused on injury management — reducing acute pain, controlling swelling — tend to be more enthusiastic about cold protocols. Sports scientists focused on training outcomes are far more cautious. Both are right in their domain. The problem comes when people apply injury-management logic to healthy training recovery, treating soreness as a problem to eliminate rather than a signal to respect.
Low-intensity cycling after training is a genuinely underappreciated alternative. It clears lactate, maintains blood flow to recovering tissues, and doesn't suppress the adaptive signaling that cold can blunt. It's less dramatic than an ice bath. That's probably why it gets less attention.
If you're training for performance and adaptation — muscle growth, strength, endurance — be cautious with cold immediately post-training. Save cold exposure for rest days, for mental clarity, for stress resilience. If you're an athlete managing a heavy competition schedule and need to feel better for tomorrow's training session, cold water immersion is a reasonable short-term tool. If you're recovering from an acute injury, cold in the first 48 hours makes sense.
The surprising insight here is that cryotherapy's value isn't really about recovery at all — it's about threshold management. It helps you tolerate more. Not by accelerating the biological repair process, but by managing the discomfort that would otherwise limit your next session. That's a legitimate use case. It's just a much narrower one than the marketing suggests.