So, what are some other methods that we can use to alleviate acute soreness? Well, if we continue down this same theme, which is saying, okay, we use some sort of pressure manipulation to enhance recovery. If compression is one strategy, you can also use things like compression boots or garments.

And these are pneumatic devices that will, you know, pump air outside you and compress back and forth. There's any number of devices that will do this. You can also use the physical hand. So this would be massage and body work. They're all really working as best we can tell on the same mechanisms, which are effectively moving fluid in and out of the tissue, as well as potentially enhancing blood flow, increasing capillarization, and which is going to only get nutrients in and waste products out.

So, you can kind of pick and choose based upon your budget, preferences, availability timing, things like that. So, those are all effective strategies. Outside of that really is the next largest category, which is now thermal. And so far in this discussion, we've mentioned cold water immersion. And I talked about in the hypertrophy section how you would not want to do that immediately post-exercise, which would be getting into cold water or an ice bath, if you're trying to grow muscle mass.

Having said that, there is good evidence showing that cold water immersion specifically is effective at reducing muscle soreness. So it is a fair consideration, and it's a classic example of how there are no free passes in physiology. Nothing is always good or always bad. It's always about what are you willing to give up versus what you're willing to get.

And in the case of like cold water immersion, you may be thinking, "Yeah, I might want some of the hypertrophic adaptations." But if you're in that phase of training where you're actually trying to push more towards optimization in that moment rather than long-term adaptation, then an ice bath might be a great choice.

In addition, if you fall into a scenario like Natasha did, and you realize like, "I'm just so unbelievably sore, this might cost me three or four or five or six days of training," it might be worth it for you to accelerate that recovery process by a couple of days so that you don't miss so much training.

So it's an algorithm, it's an equation. What am I looking for? Again, if I'm in season or trying to compete, or if I have just done way, way, way too much exercise and I'm really in significant pain, you would probably be willing to give up some small percentage of eventual muscle growth after a single session to get out of pain.

So of the cold strategies, cold water immersion is clearly the best approach rather than cold air or some other tactics. So a cold shower is probably not enough here. You really do want to be either in moderately cold. This is maybe 40 to 50-degree water for probably north of 15 minutes, or you can be in sub-40 for as little as maybe five minutes to get some of the effect.

And there's been a number of studies, so I'm sort of summarizing a bunch of that kind of into one rather than going through them point by point. The numbers you just threw out, which I'm assuming are Fahrenheit, seem really cold to me, right? Uncomfortably cold. Absolutely. I always recommend that people ease into it as a protocol overall, that they not immediately go to 35-degree cold water if they've never done it before.

That said, once people are comfortable being uncomfortable, because I always answer the question how cold should it be exactly, would you agree that it should be very, very cold, so much so that you really, really want to get out, but that you're able to stay in safely, whatever that value happens to be?

You absolutely need to be safe. Having said that, we have actually, in our XPT retreats, put dozens if not hundreds of people at this point immediately into the sub-35-degree water their first time ever and done three minutes, multiple rounds in a session, so they can handle it. You don't need to go that crazy if you don't want.

You kind of have to play a game, right? Do you want to be really, really cold for a short amount of time, or do you want to be kind of cold for a longer amount of time? Maybe the only mistake you could make is doing something like 65-degree water, which to most people is not very comfortable, and doing five or ten minutes.

It's just not going to be effective. It's probably not going to be effective. If you're like, "Man, 35 is absolutely crazy," and you want to do 55-degree water, and there's literature in that area, but it's going to say you need to probably be there somewhere almost surely north of ten minutes, and some of it will actually show you need to be in there well north of 20 to 30 minutes.

For my money, I would rather go really, really cold and get it done in five minutes, but personal preference on this one. You can also make it a little bit easier on yourself. There is not nearly as much evidence, but there is some on contrast stuff. This is when you go cold, hot, and sort of back and forth.

There are no really good rules in terms of how much should you go, how many rounds, how long in cold, how long in hot. Again, there have been a couple of studies, and obviously those studies use numbers, but that doesn't mean those have been tested to see what are optimal, which is a very big difference.

You can really just kind of play that by feel. Hot is good for recovery. You just have to be careful because you are going to put more blood flow in the area, and so you may walk out of there with some additional acute swelling, which is then going to put greater pressure on there.

You have to kind of play with that. I personally really like hot for recovery. I will feel maybe not great in that moment, but the next day I tend to feel really, really good. In addition, if I wake up the next morning and I'm really, really hurting and I'm super stiff, a hot bath will help that quite a bit.

So you can play with some of those protocols, and you don't have to do ice. There's absolutely no requirement to do so. It is just an option if you're interested. DAN: The studies of Dr. Susanna Soberg are not directly aimed at alleviating soreness or recovery. They're more about increasing thermal capacity by storage of brown adipose tissue, not the blubbery fat, but the stuff around the clavicles and around the heart that help you generate body heat at rest and metabolism and so on.

The numbers there that she's come up with, again, have not been tested against all the possible derivations. Just like with breathing, we did five-minute sessions, but who knows, maybe a minute would have been equally effective. There are constraints on these sorts of studies. But the values that she's come up with, which seem to be good thresholds for making sure that an adaptation response is triggered by heat and cold, is it ends up being 57 minutes per week total of uncomfortable but safe heat, in that case sauna, and that can be all in one session or breaking it up into a couple of sessions on the same day or different days, and then 11 minutes per week of cold, either in one single session or multiple sessions.

Again, one could do more. One could break that up over multiple days or do it all in one day or do it all in one hour in the sauna and then 11 minutes in the cold or vice versa, although that seems a little bit extreme, especially for the uninitiated.

But those are the numbers that have been studied. But as you point out, there are not a lot of really thorough studies examining different cold protocols according to temperature by time requirements. So there is a bit of subjective feel required to establish a routine. And I would actually say this is another time to reemphasize something we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, which is that pain itself is not a defined outcome.

It's heavily influenced by your perception. And so if you don't feel like they work for you, they won't work. If you feel like they work fantastic, they do. So it's a challenging field to get really objective data on. So there's always going to be a little bit of subjective nature to some of these things.

I can tell you anecdotally, we've used hot and cold contrasts for a long time with athletes. Some love it, some don't care for it, and everything in between. So it's one of those things where I never mandated. Of course, I can't mandate anything for anyone I work with. But I'm never like, "Hey, are you interested?

Great. You're struggling in this area. Do you want to try this? You did and you liked it. Great. You're struggling in this area and you tried it. You didn't love it. Okay, fine. I'm not. We'll find other routes as we'll get into. There's a lot of ways to enhance recovery.

This is only one, and it hasn't even really come down to stopping the problem in the first place. We're just treating symptoms, which is first line of defense, but you really need to go back and figure out why it's happening to begin with as a solution. These are just different, again, acute symptom management tactics.