Immersion in cold water was something that seemed to be reserved for athletes who needed a good physical recovery after considerable effort, as happens, for example, in the case of football players. But it’s something that has become a ritual for anyone aiming to keep tissues healthy and, above all, young. Although we really have to ask ourselves: Is there any point in being under cold water for long periods of time?
a research published in the newspaper Advanced Biology A few years ago he sought to answer this question, recruiting 10 young men aged 23 and physically active. With these samples, they began submerging them in cold water to analyze what was happening to their mononuclear cells as they traveled throughout their bodies. The problem is that there was no control group to make a real comparison.
What we wanted here was to observe the battle between two cellular processes that are fundamental, namely apoptosis, i.e. programmed cell death, and autophagy, which is our body’s recycling and cleaning system.
result They showed that adaptation is real, but not immediate, because the body suffers from being below the minimum temperature during the first four days. And he suffered because signs of autophagy not working properly were detected and there was also an increase in cleaved caspase-3, a marker that tells us cells are dying due to stress.
However, everything changed on day 7, as the cells learned to defend themselves. Thus, the clearing system was more efficient and cell destruction returned to its basal level. Regarding inflammation, there was some disappointment, since classic markers such as interleukin-6 did not change much between being outside or inside the cold water bath. This is why they concluded that repeated exposure to cold improves cellular tolerance to low temperatures.
fountain of youth It seems to be among the most fantasy books yet because we haven’t found it yet. This study did not go that far, and we can only rely on the statement of one author who extrapolated the results to a supposed resistance to cellular aging, although there were no variables we were told about this measure.
What we know. But if we distance ourselves from the necessity of being practically eternal, we find the advantages of being able to take an ice bath. One of the most obvious is a review published this year that confirms that immersing yourself in ice helps speed recovery, reducing pain. The problem is, if you use this system continuously after training, you are harming strength gains and muscle growth.
If we think about the psychological benefits, the truth is that today there is no evidence that allows us to confirm that cold water improves mood or reduces stress, since many existing studies have very high bias.
real danger Although the anti-aging benefits are unproven, ice diving is not a harmful sport. Here we must consider that, at the moment of touching the ice water, the body reacts with hyperventilation and tachycardia that wants to compensate for the drop in body temperature. An effect known as the ‘cold shock response’.
And this is a problem, since we are talking about a significant cardiovascular risk that can lead to death in this bathing in open water or without supervision.
Picture | Olavi Antilla
In Xataka | The future of hygiene is “dry toilets”: it is increasingly clear that they have less bacteria
