Cold plunge after lifting blunts muscle gains

In the trials that tested it, cold water immersion right after each strength session led to somewhat smaller gains in muscle size over several weeks than training without it. The effect is small, it shows up more clearly for muscle size than for strength, and it comes from a handful of short trials in young adults, mostly men, several of which cooled only the trained arm or leg.

A 2024 meta-analysis pooled eight training studies lasting 4 to 12 weeks. Muscle growth was smaller when training was followed by cold immersion (a comparative standardized mean difference of -0.22, a small effect), and the authors put the probability that the difference is below zero at about 96 percent. They rated the underlying studies fair to poor in quality. A 2023 meta-analysis of ten studies found a small reduction in strength gains overall (-0.23), but when the whole body was immersed rather than just the trained limb, strength gains did not differ from control.

The longest single trial followed 21 physically active men for 12 weeks. Those who did 10 minutes of cold immersion after each session gained less strength and muscle mass than those who did active recovery, and the 17 percent growth in type II muscle fibres seen with active recovery did not occur with cold immersion. A 7-week trial in 16 men found cold immersion blunted type II fibre growth while leg press strength improved about equally in both groups. A randomized crossover trial of 11 participants found no significant difference in leg press strength, its registered primary outcome, while muscle thickness, a secondary measure, grew less after cooling. Two trials found no difference. In 18 trained rugby players who lifted through four-week blocks, each followed by a different recovery, total lean mass on a body scan did not differ between blocks that ended each session with 15 minutes up to the neck in 15°C water and blocks that ended with stretching. A sham-controlled study of 13 men over 16 sessions found no difference in strength or muscle architecture.

The biology behind the finding has been measured in people. After a lifting session, cold immersion blunted the signalling that switches on muscle building (the mTORC1 pathway and p70S6 kinase) and the rise in satellite cells, the cells that add nuclei to growing fibres. In a 2025 study of 12 young men, the leg cooled in 8°C water had lower blood flow through its small vessels for hours afterward and built less of an amino acid drink into muscle protein than the leg kept in 30°C water, and the two drops tracked each other.

Every training trial applied the cold within about 15 minutes of the last set, for 10 to 20 minutes, in water at about 10°C in six of the eight pooled trials and about 15°C in the other two. Three of the eight immersed the whole body, as a home plunge does: for muscle size, two of those found smaller gains on at least one measure and one found no difference. None of these sources tested a plunge taken hours later or on a separate day, so they do not show whether spacing the two apart changes the result. Nearly all participants were men in their early twenties.