Should You Do Cryo Before or After a Workout?

For most gym-goers, cryotherapy belongs after your workout, not before it. Pre-exercise cold exposure does little to boost strength or power, and it can stiffen your connective tissues right when you need them to be pliable. Post-exercise cold exposure, on the other hand, reliably reduces soreness over the following days. But that soreness reduction comes with a significant trade-off that most cryotherapy marketing glosses over: if you are training to build muscle, regular icing after lifting can blunt the very gains you worked for. The “before or after” question, then, is less about picking the right slot on your schedule and more about understanding what you are trying to get out of the session.

Pre-Workout Cryo Does Not Boost Strength or Power

If you are hoping a quick cryo session before lifting will make you stronger or more explosive, the research is not encouraging. A systematic review of pre-exercise whole-body and partial-body cryotherapy found no meaningful improvement in maximal voluntary contraction, peak power output, or isometric torque compared to control conditions. Differences between cryo and no-cryo groups were essentially zero across multiple measures of neuromuscular performance.¹ A separate study looking specifically at countermovement jump performance after partial-body cryotherapy found unclear differences in jump velocity and power at one, two, and three hours after exposure.²

This makes sense when you consider what cold does to your body. Whole-body cryotherapy drops heart rate and cardiac output while increasing peripheral resistance.³ Blood flow to the skin and superficial tissues gets suppressed and stays suppressed even after the cold stimulus ends.⁴ If you are about to ask your muscles to fire hard and fast, sending less blood to them first is counterproductive. You would essentially be undoing part of what a good warm-up achieves.

The One Pre-Workout Exception: Endurance in the Heat

There is one scenario where pre-exercise cooling actually earns its keep. If you are an endurance athlete about to race or train in hot conditions, pre-cooling can delay the point at which rising core temperature forces you to slow down. A systematic review found moderate evidence that cold water immersion before endurance exercise in the heat improved performance, with limited evidence that drinking ice slurry had a similar effect.⁵ A meta-analysis of 21 studies on external pre-cooling reported a moderate positive effect on performance, concentrated in endurance cycling and running in hot environments.⁶

The mechanism is straightforward: you start with a lower core temperature, which gives your body more thermal headroom before heat-related fatigue kicks in. This benefit disappears in temperate or cool conditions, and it applies primarily to sustained efforts lasting long enough for heat accumulation to become a limiting factor. Sprints, heavy lifts, and short interval sessions do not benefit. If you are heading out for a long run on a summer afternoon, a cold shower or ice vest beforehand is worth considering. If you are heading to an air-conditioned gym for a lifting session, skip it.

Cold Stiffens Connective Tissue

One concern about pre-workout cryo that deserves attention is what cold does to your tendons and ligaments. Cooling increased the force needed to stretch both the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments of the knee, while heat treatment did the opposite and increased flexibility.⁷ Stiffer connective tissue before exercise could theoretically raise injury risk, particularly for activities requiring large ranges of motion or rapid changes of direction.

That said, the picture is not entirely alarming. A study on cold water immersion and knee joint position sense found no evidence that cooling impaired proprioception enough to constitute an enhanced injury risk during subsequent activity.⁸ So cold may stiffen your tissues without necessarily making you clumsy. Still, the combination of reduced blood flow, stiffer connective tissue, and no meaningful performance benefit makes pre-workout cryo a hard sell for most training situations.

Post-Workout Cryo Reduces Soreness

This is the use case most people have in mind, and it is where the evidence is strongest. A meta-analysis pooling data from 27 studies found that cold application, especially cold water immersion, significantly reduced delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) at 24 hours, 48 hours, and 96 hours after exercise compared to control conditions.⁹ A randomized trial using whole-body cryotherapy chambers found lower levels of blood markers associated with muscle damage (creatine kinase and leukocyte content) over the first 24 to 96 hours in the cryo group, along with reduced muscle stiffness.¹⁰

The recovery benefit also appears to peak at around 24 hours rather than immediately after exercise. A systematic review concluded that cold water immersion had a more beneficial effect on recovery in the first 24 hours following exercise compared to immediately post-exercise.¹¹ So if you ice after training on Monday, expect to feel the biggest difference on Tuesday morning, not Monday night.

The Muscle Growth Problem

Here is the catch that anyone training for size needs to understand. Cold water immersion after resistance exercise dampens the molecular signaling that tells your muscles to grow. A study tracking anabolic markers after strength training found that a key growth signal (p70S6 kinase phosphorylation) was significantly higher at 2 and 24 hours post-exercise in the group that did active recovery compared to the group that did cold water immersion. In the cold group, the signal had returned to baseline by 24 hours, while the active recovery group maintained elevated signaling through 48 hours.¹²

Over longer training periods, this translates into real differences. A study following participants through a full resistance training program found that cold water immersion blunted increases in type II muscle fiber size while also increasing markers of protein breakdown. Interestingly, maximal strength gains were similar between the cold and control groups.¹³ The researchers’ conclusion was blunt: post-exercise cold water immersion should be avoided if muscle hypertrophy is desired.

This is a genuinely important finding. If your primary goal is getting bigger, habitual icing after lifting sessions is working against you. The soreness you feel is partly a byproduct of the inflammatory and signaling processes that drive muscle adaptation, and suppressing that inflammation appears to suppress some of the adaptation along with it. For pure strength, the picture is more forgiving, since the strength gains remained intact in the study above. But for anyone chasing muscle growth, post-workout cryo is a trade with unfavorable terms.

What About Endurance Adaptations?

Endurance athletes face a different calculus. Cold water immersion after endurance training may actually support certain cellular adaptations rather than hinder them. One study found that regular post-exercise cold water immersion increased markers associated with mitochondrial biogenesis, the process by which your muscles build more energy-producing machinery.¹⁴ The researchers suggested that the additional cold stress on top of the exercise stress amplified the adaptive signal in pathways relevant to endurance.

However, these molecular-level improvements did not translate into better aerobic fitness in a study of whole-body cryotherapy combined with high-intensity interval training, where VO2peak was unchanged compared to training without cryo.¹⁵ A possible explanation is that peak aerobic capacity depends heavily on central cardiovascular adaptations (heart, blood volume), while the cold-enhanced signals operate at the muscle level. More mitochondria in the muscle are useful, but they are not the main bottleneck for VO2max. For endurance athletes, the takeaway is that post-workout cold probably does not hurt your training adaptations the way it hurts hypertrophy, but it also may not add much beyond the soreness relief.

Inflammation Is Not Universally Suppressed

One of the selling points of cryotherapy is that it “fights inflammation,” but the research is more mixed than the marketing implies. One study found that whole-body cryotherapy after severe exercise reduced the pro-inflammatory marker IL-1β and CRP while increasing anti-inflammatory IL-1ra.¹⁶ But another study using similar protocols found that whole-body cryotherapy at -110°C after high-intensity intermittent exercise did not alter IL-6, IL-10, myoglobin, cortisol, testosterone, or their ratios compared to a control condition.¹⁷

The discrepancy may come down to the type and severity of exercise, the specific cryo protocol, or individual variation. The blanket claim that cryo suppresses post-exercise inflammation oversimplifies what appears to be a selective and inconsistent effect.

How Much of the Benefit Is Placebo?

This question does not get asked often enough. Two well-designed studies compared cryotherapy interventions against a placebo and found something striking. After a marathon, neither cold water immersion nor whole-body cryotherapy was more effective than a placebo at improving functional recovery or perceived training stress. The researchers concluded that treatment belief and the placebo effect may be largely responsible for the perceived benefits of cryotherapy after endurance events.¹⁸ A similar study following resistance exercise found that neither whole-body cryotherapy nor cold water immersion outperformed a placebo treatment in accelerating recovery.¹⁹

This does not mean the soreness reduction observed in other trials is entirely imaginary. The meta-analyses comparing cold to passive recovery (doing nothing) consistently show benefits. But when you compare cold to a convincing sham treatment, the gap narrows dramatically. This suggests that some portion of what makes people feel better after cryotherapy is the ritual, the novelty, and the expectation of relief rather than the cold itself. If cryo fits your budget and you enjoy it, the placebo component is still doing something useful for your experience. Just calibrate your expectations accordingly.

Cold Water Immersion Versus Whole-Body Cryotherapy Chambers

These are often discussed interchangeably, but they work differently. Whole-body cryotherapy chambers expose you to extremely cold air, typically between -110°C and -140°C. Despite that dramatic temperature, air is a poor conductor of heat. A review noted that although WBC produces a large temperature gradient, the relatively poor thermal conductivity of air prevents significant subcutaneous and core body cooling.²⁰

Cold water immersion (an ice bath at roughly 8-15°C) is less extreme in temperature but more effective at pulling heat out of your body, because water conducts heat roughly 25 times better than air. A direct comparison found that skin temperatures were lower immediately after a WBC session, but from 10 to 60 minutes afterward, the cold water group had consistently lower skin temperatures.²¹ Neither protocol in that study achieved skin temperatures thought to be required for a true analgesic effect. The practical implication: a $5 bag of ice in your bathtub delivers a comparable or greater cooling stimulus than a $75 cryotherapy chamber session. The research on recovery outcomes (DOMS, markers of damage) is also far deeper for cold water immersion than for WBC chambers, so the evidence base is stronger for the cheaper option.

Body Composition and Sex Affect How You Respond

Not everyone cools the same way. Women tend to cool more than men during the same WBC exposure. One study found that mean skin temperature after WBC was significantly lower in women (about 19.6°C) compared to men (about 22.1°C), with especially large differences at the thighs, calves, and arms.²² Another study confirmed that the drop in skin temperature was significantly greater in women than men after the same exposure.²³

This seems paradoxical at first, since women typically have a higher body fat percentage, and you might expect the insulating layer to keep them warmer. But fat insulates the core while allowing the skin to cool faster. A preliminary study found that women have roughly 37% higher internal thermal resistance than men, meaning the insulating effect of body fat keeps heat from reaching the skin surface.²⁴ The researchers suggested that women may need shorter cryo exposures to reach the same therapeutic skin cooling as men. Body fat percentage predicted skin cooling response across both sexes, with leaner individuals cooling less at the surface. If you are using a cryotherapy chamber, a one-size-fits-all protocol is probably not optimal.

Protocol Matters More Than People Realize

Duration is not a “more is better” situation. A study on elite rugby league players tested one-, two-, and three-minute exposures at -135°C and found that two minutes produced the best combination of physiological and perceptual changes. The three-minute exposure introduced negative effects without additional benefit.²⁵ A separate trial examining how long it takes to reach target skin temperatures found that normal-weight participants hit the threshold at about four minutes, while overweight participants reached it in roughly three and a half minutes, and skin temperature remained below baseline for at least 30 minutes afterward.²⁶

For cold water immersion, most research protocols use water between 8°C and 15°C for 10 to 15 minutes. Going colder or longer does not appear to produce proportionally better outcomes and increases the risk of adverse reactions. A systematic review emphasized that the duration of the cold stimulus, not just the temperature, is a critical factor in short-term recovery outcomes.¹¹

Training Status Changes the Equation

Most of the studies showing dramatic DOMS reduction used untrained subjects performing unfamiliar eccentric exercise, which produces unusually severe soreness. A review pointed out that this model is unlikely to closely reflect the circumstances of well-trained athletes, who experience far less exercise-induced muscle damage from their normal training because of the repeated-bout effect.²⁷ If you have been training consistently, your baseline soreness is already lower, which means the absolute benefit of cryo is smaller. The research on untrained people performing unaccustomed exercise may overstate the effect for a regular gym-goer or competitive athlete.

This does not mean cryo is useless for experienced athletes, but it means the dramatic “night and day” recovery stories you see in marketing are more likely to reflect novice exercisers or people returning from a layoff. For someone deep into a training block, the marginal benefit of cold exposure on soreness is more modest, and the potential cost to hypertrophy remains.

Cardiovascular Considerations

Whole-body cryotherapy produces a transient spike in blood pressure. A study in non-professional athletes found that mean systolic blood pressure rose slightly from about 118 mmHg at baseline to around 121 mmHg after a session. All participants showed an increase, but changes remained within the normal range.²⁸ For healthy people, this is unremarkable. For anyone with uncontrolled hypertension, cardiovascular disease, or Raynaud’s phenomenon, the sudden vasoconstriction warrants caution. If you have a heart condition, talk to your doctor before stepping into a cryo chamber.

Combining Cryo With Other Recovery Modalities

Some facilities offer cryo alongside sauna sessions, contrast therapy, or compression. A study comparing the effects of cryotherapy and sauna on post-exercise blood markers in athletes found that prior sauna use appeared to amplify the exercise-induced changes seen in blood serum, while prior cryotherapy slightly dampened them.²⁹ This suggests that pairing heat and cold around training is not a simple additive equation. The order and type of thermal stimulus interact with each other and with the exercise stress in ways that are still being mapped out. If you enjoy contrast therapy, there is no strong evidence it is harmful, but the research is too thin to make specific recommendations about sequencing heat and cold around workouts.