Cold plunges eased soreness, not strength recovery

Cold-water immersion has become a default post-training ritual, sold as a way to bounce back faster. But recovery is not one thing: maximal strength, explosive power, biochemical markers of muscle damage and how sore you feel can all move independently, and they move on different timescales. If cold water helps soreness but temporarily dulls power output, the practical question becomes when you use it rather than whether it works. This review set out to map those time-dependent effects and identify the window in which acute cold-water immersion is actually useful.

The authors searched PubMed, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library and Embase from inception to 1 September 2025 for randomised controlled trials comparing a single acute cold-water immersion bout with passive recovery in healthy individuals after exercise. Twenty-two RCTs met the criteria. Outcomes were maximal voluntary isometric contraction, countermovement jump, creatine kinase and visual analogue scale soreness, analysed by time point after exercise. Methodological quality, risk of bias and certainty of evidence were assessed with the PEDro scale, the RoB 2 tool and GRADE respectively, with pooling performed in Stata-MP 18.0.

For maximal voluntary isometric contraction there was no significant overall or time-dependent effect (g = 0.08, 95% CI −0.11 to 0.26, p = 0.42; moderate certainty). Countermovement jump showed no overall effect (g = 0.01) but a significant difference across time points, driven by a transient impairment immediately after exercise (0 h: g = −0.68, 95% CI −1.16 to −0.20, p = 0.01) that had disappeared by 24–48 h. Soreness scores were lower with immersion (g = −0.58, p = 0.01), though heterogeneity was substantial and certainty very low. Creatine kinase initially showed a small reduction (g = −0.43) that fell to non-significance after trim-and-fill adjustment (g = −0.16).

This sharpens a picture that has been forming for some time: cold water is better at changing how recovery feels than at restoring what muscle can produce. The immediate jump decrement adds a concrete cost to the timing question, while the collapse of the creatine kinase effect after adjusting for publication bias is a warning about how the earlier literature accumulated. Cluster-robust sensitivity analyses kept the direction of the soreness and creatine kinase effects but weakened their significance. Open questions remain around water temperature, duration, immersion depth and whether repeated exposure behaves like a single bout.

If your reason for getting in cold water is feeling less sore tomorrow, this pooled evidence offers some support, albeit at very low certainty. If your reason is recovering strength or power faster, the evidence here does not back that up. The immediate post-exercise dip in jump performance is a reason to think carefully about scheduling an ice bath shortly before anything explosive. And the disappearing muscle-damage benefit is a reminder that a marker moving on a blood test is not the same as a recovery you can feel or use.