The Acute and Longer-Term Effects of Cold Water Immersion in Highly-Trained Volleyball Athletes During an Intense Training Block.

The use of cold water immersion (CWI) as a recovery strategy following exercise has drawn mixed findings over the last few decades. The purpose of the current study was two-fold; (1) to determine the acute effects of CWI within the training week, and (2) to investigate the longer-term effects of CWI over a 16-day period. In a randomized, controlled trial, 13 national-level volleyball athletes were allocated to two groups, an experimental (CWI, = 7) and a control group ( = 6) during a 3-week national training camp. The experimental group were exposed to a CWI protocol after the last training session of each day (12 CWI sessions). Measures of lower (countermovement jump and squat jump height) and upper-body (medicine ball throw distance) power were collected pre- and post-training camp. Perceptual and neuromuscular performance measures (countermovement jump) were obtained during the training camp. No significant differences between groups were observed for any measure ( > 0.05), however, effect sizes were observed between experimental and control groups on day two of weeks one and two. Three weeks of training resulted in a significant decrease in countermovement jump height in the control group. A moderate effect size ( = 0.65) was found for countermovement jump performance between the experimental and control groups. Cold water immersion seems to provide little benefit to recovery in the acute setting (within the training week), however, chronically, there was a trend toward a benefit when implementing cold water immersion in well-trained volleyball athletes over 16 days.