Forget about it post-run, should you have an ice massage BEFORE you run?! - Yahoo Lifestyle UK

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Should you ice before a run?Science Photo Library - Getty Images


Ice baths have usually been used as a post-exercise recovery aid – although scientists are divided about its benefits – but a new study looked at the merits of icing pre-run.

Brazilian researchers took fourteen recreational members (all men, again) and had them perform to 4km time-trials around a 400m track – one with ice massage beforehand, one without.

The icing was applied to runners calf muscles, so there’s no need to go for a full-on ice bath to recreate the experiment at home. And the results are impressive.

Researchers found that the runners performed the 4K time-trial 5.5% faster after ice massage than without ice. That’s a brrr-illiant performance advantage, resulting in finish times more than a minute apart: 19:06 with ice, 20:12 without.

How could this be? The researchers proposed the ice created ‘a reduced exercise-induced pain perception.’ This, said researchers ‘enabled runners to increase the speed for a comparable RPE [received perception of effort] during exercise, thereby improving performance’.

Now, fourteen runners is an incredibly small sample, but the results are intriguing so we await further studies on the topic to see if pre-run ice really can make a difference.

If you can't wait for that, perhaps before your next parkrun, break out the ice packs – it might propel you to a new PB (though we can't promise you it well!)

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