Why do Ice Baths? Part 1
This short and not at all complete list identifies how this wonderful tool helps:
Lowers chronic disease through - Lower inflammation and the biomarkers in the blood. Inflammation interleukins 6 and 8 go down, and anti-inflammation interleukin 10 goes up. This has been proven with scientific research.
Increase confidence - Your body interprets this as a life threatening level stress and you do this voluntarily, for as long as you’d like. Your body interprets this as a life threatening situation. You do this calmly and on purpose and you start to see the daily stress of the day is not actually a threat and is really more annoying. Yes mortgages are annoying but aren’t going to kill you
Lowering pain - the bath causes your body to release adrenaline and this causes you to feel good. This helps you overcome pain, which allows you to move more, which further reduces your pain. The biggest thing with chronic pain is starting to move the things so that you can restore them. Being stiff from pain keeps you from helping yourself. This has helped my back pain improve much, and it improves everyday.
Increase circulation - improve your cardiorespiratory fitness. Did you know that you might be cold all the time because you’ve never trained your blood vessels to deal with that sort of stress? There are millions of muscles around you 80,000 ish miles of blood vessels that squeeze tightly when you go into the bath (this is actually why it can cause pain in newbies to the practice because those muscles are complaining that they aren’t supposed to be used) then they relax as you warm back up. This causes your whole cardiovascular system to restore, strengthen, and feel better. This helps push nutrition to your skin and hair, increases blood flow throughout your body to the tips of your fingers to the middle of your brain. This can help restore feeling, sensation, blood flow, and function by helping nutrition flow into the body and waste products get out.
