Cold plunges aid workout recovery

Across most of the large reviews, cold water immersion after hard exercise reduced next-day muscle soreness and made people feel more recovered; a 2026 review limited to endurance athletes found no clear benefit over resting. Whether it brings strength and power back faster is less clear: the large reviews disagree, and the answer depends on the kind of exercise and on when performance is tested. In the first hours after a plunge, some reviews found sprint and jump performance lower, while one 2022 review found endurance performance better an hour later. And in training studies, plunging straight after each lifting session was followed by somewhat smaller gains in muscle size, a small effect from a handful of short trials.

The largest review, published in 2026, pooled 87 randomized trials with 2,313 people, mostly men. Compared with resting, immersions of about 9 to 12°C for 10 to 15 minutes improved how recovered people felt and lowered blood markers of muscle damage, in secondary analyses, while after weight training strength recovered no better than with resting, a result the review rates as moderate certainty. A second 2026 review of 30 trials found less soreness and lower creatine kinase, no faster recovery of strength or jump height, and a drop in jump power straight after immersion when only part of the body was immersed. A third 2026 review, of 52 single-session studies, also found less soreness and lower blood markers of muscle damage; it compared water at about 5, 10 and 15°C and found no water temperature that did better than another on these measures. A 2026 umbrella review of 15 earlier reviews, covering 161 studies, also reported less soreness, lower muscle damage markers and no faster strength recovery, and rated the methods of all 15 reviews low or critically low.

Not every review agrees on performance. A 2022 review of 68 studies found that strength and jump height had recovered better by 24 hours and that endurance performance was better an hour later, while sprint and jump performance were worse in the first hours; endurance recovery was better after exercise in warm conditions but not in temperate ones. In the largest 2026 review, colder, longer immersions improved power after team sports and showed potential power benefits after weight training, both at low certainty, while strength after weight training recovered no better than with resting. The same cold that eases soreness the next day can lower sprint and jump performance in the first hours after. The soreness benefit has also not appeared in every group: a 2026 review of 16 trials in competitive endurance athletes found no recovery method, cold water included, better than passive rest for soreness, a blood marker of muscle damage or performance. Its soreness result rested on five trials and reversed when two were removed, and a comparison bath in neutral-temperature water, tested in one trial, ranked about as well as the active methods. Because the people in these trials knew whether they were in cold water, its authors note that expectation cannot be separated from a physiological effect.

The tradeoff appears when the goal is building muscle. In a 12-week study of 21 physically active men, cold water immersion after each strength session led to smaller gains in muscle mass and strength than active recovery did. Measured after single sessions, cooling right after lifting blunted the signaling that drives muscle growth (including the mTOR pathway) and the rise in satellite cells, and a 7-week training study in 16 men found smaller growth of muscle fibers while strength gains were about the same with and without cold. A 2024 review pooling 8 training studies found smaller muscle growth with cold on average, a small effect whose range of likely values reaches zero. The same interference has not appeared after endurance training. The studies that found it used immersion straight after each lifting session, and none of the sources here tested a plunge taken later. The cost was measured against active recovery in one of the two training studies cited here and against passive rest in the other.

A 2012 review reports that submersion in cold water can cause a high rate of abnormal heart rhythms even in healthy volunteers. It concerns submersion rather than the waist or chest deep immersion used after training, and it does not report on cold water immersion as a recovery practice. The authors propose that two opposing reflexes firing at once may account for this: the cold shock response that speeds the heart and the diving response that slows it. They also propose that in some vulnerable people this may cause deaths previously attributed to drowning or hypothermia. They present both points as a hypothesis they are weighing the evidence for, not an established finding.