"But the more we study ice bathing, the more we learn that athletes have it backward: regular immersion in cold water markedly inhibits recovery from strenuous exercise. Muscle soreness is a consequence of doing physical activity to which you’re unaccustomed. That could be a gym session, a run, or a repetitive household chore that took longer than you expected. Just as a rubber band becomes frayed if you continually stretch it under load, your muscles sustain minuscule tears if they’re stretched too far or exert too much force. The subsequent damage causes a few days of swelling, inflammation, and soreness. It’s actually a normal and essential part of the muscular adaptation to exercise, associated with something called the overload principle. In any case, if the stress is applied regularly and with enough recovery, the muscles adapt by laying down new structural proteins, like a construction crew assembling steel beams to support the infrastructure of a building.
"Ice bathing fundamentally inhibits this process. In a collaboration between scientists in Australia and Norway, researchers found that cold-water immersion after hard exercise suppressed
signaling pathways associated with recovery, an effect that lasted for several days. Another
study, this time from the Netherlands, showed that ice bathing attenuated the muscle’s uptake of dietary proteins—nutrients considered important for the growth and maintenance of cells."
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