Thanks to advances in training methods, nutrition and most importantly, recovery, sporting careers now last longer than ever before. Where once upon a time athletes were considered in the winter of their career as soon as they hit 30, nowadays it’s not uncommon to see elite sportsmen and women competing at the very highest levels well into their late 30’s and even 40’s.
When you consider that every year spent competing as an athlete is an opportunity to maximise income, it’s not just about health, it’s also about wealth. According to the Forbes list of the ‘Highest Paid Athletes in the World’ (2021), 8 of the top 10 were over 30.
PROLONG YOUR CAREER, PROLONG YOUR LEGACY AND BOOST YOUR INCOME.
In this article we’re going to look at evidence-based ways whole body cryotherapy can help to prolong your sporting career.
HOW WILL CRYOTHERAPY EXTEND YOUR SPORTING CAREER?
A career as an athlete takes its toll on the body. In a culture where you constantly strive for bigger, faster, stronger, more explosive, and more powerful, the risk of injury rises dramatically. Injuries shorten sporting careers.
In a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, data showed that the mean percentage of athletes experiencing pain is 74.5%. When you compare that to around 35% for the general population, you begin to see a problem.
Many of these injuries are in the soft tissues and connective tissues, so helping these tissues recover faster is fundamental to extending a sporting career.
By using cryotherapy as a recovery aid, you reduce the risk of injury significantly, plus you help your body return to a game-ready state sooner. This means your subsequent injury risk is reduced, so even in compressed fixture windows you’re less likely to break down.
CRYOTHERAPY IMPROVES THE BEDROCK OF RECOVERY
The topic of sleep has garnered much attention over the last couple of decades, as the link between sleep hygiene and athletic performance has been solidified. There’s no doubt left that inadequate sleep dramatically impacts sporting performance or slows down injury recovery. It also increases injury risk.
If we focus on performance alone at this point, under-performing athletes don’t earn contracts, they don’t win competitions or fixtures and they’re forced to retire earlier than they’d like.
Whole body cryotherapy has been proven to help improve the sleep of physically active men. There’s no reason to believe that this wouldn’t apply to women also, the study just happened to use male subjects.
Put simply, improve your sleep, improve your performance, and improve your recovery. A 3-minute whole-body cryotherapy session is sufficient enough to elicit this response according to the study.
REDUCTION OF INFLAMMATORY MARKERS
The link between chronic inflammation and ageing is well established. High levels of inflammation are associated with speeding up the ageing process and reducing tissue health.
Exercise itself is a pro-inflammatory activity, so we must manage the inflammatory response as quickly and effectively as possible in order to repair tissues and improve the athlete’s health.
Whole body cryotherapy is shown to be remarkably effective at this, with 3 minute cryotherapy sessions being shown to reduce inflammatory markers and an acute phase inflammatory response after exercise. Whilst it can’t promise to reverse the ageing process we all suffer from, it can certainly help slow it down.
PROLONGING YOUR SPORTING CAREER
In this article we’ve shown some of the evidence in support of cryotherapy as an incredibly effective ally in the performance and recovery world. With a small investment of time, you can have a disproportionately large reward. It’ll help you feel better, sleep better, and perform better.
Other athletes use cryotherapy. Don’t give away that advantage.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PROLONGING YOUR SPORTING CAREER WITH WHOLE BODY CRYOTHERAPY
RP-X are the leading providers of whole-body cryotherapy chambers in the UK. We have nearly two decades in the space and offer a wide range of products for athletes looking for performance and recovery help.
Contact us on info@rp-x.com or 01234 981913 for more information. Alternatively, you can book a consultation with one of our cryotherapy experts to discuss how a cryotherapy chamber could help your sporting career.
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