433: Cold, Heat, Compression & Massage: What the Science Really Says - Episode 3

This week on the Real Life Runners Podcast, we’re continuing our recovery series by diving into the tools that everyone seems to be talking about — cold plunges, saunas, compression gear, massage guns, and more.

There’s a lot of hype out there, but what actually works? 🤔
 In this episode, we break down the science behind these popular recovery methods — how they affect your body, when to use them, and when they might actually get in the way of your progress.

We’ll talk about:
Cold therapy — how ice baths and cold plunges can help reduce soreness and inflammation, but also why you might not want to use them after every workout.
Heat and saunas — the surprising benefits of using heat for long-term adaptation and overall recovery.
Compression tools — do those sleeves and boots really work, and how can they improve circulation and perceived recovery?
Massage and self-massage — the benefits of touch, relaxation, and nervous system regulation (and why this one might be more powerful than you think).

And of course, we’ll remind you that no tool — no matter how fancy or expensive — can replace the foundations of recovery: sleep, nutrition, and managing stress.

By the end of this episode, you’ll know how to use these recovery tools strategically to support your running, not sabotage your adaptations.

🎧 Tune in to learn how to make recovery work smarter for you, so you can run stronger, stay healthy, and keep loving the run!

02:53 Exploring Recovery Modalities

05:49 Cold Therapy: Benefits and Drawbacks

14:46 Heat Therapy: How It Works

19:57 Compression Therapy: What You Need to Know

25:29 Massage Therapy: Myths and Facts

30:12 Choosing the Right Recovery Tool

33:49 Common Recovery Mistakes

Join the 30 Day Running Reset and get a plan that will help you build a strong and injury-proof body by combining running and strength training in a way that actually works for runners like you.

Gain access to my new secret podcast, Unbreakable: The Runner's Guide To Injury-Proofing Your Body After 40. Click here: https://www.realliferunners.com/secret

Join the Team! --> https://www.realliferunners.com/team

Thanks for Listening!!

Be sure to hit FOLLOW on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one!

Come find us on Instagram and say hi!

Don't forget: The information on this website is not intended to treat or diagnose any medical condition or to provide medical advice. It is intended for general education in the areas of health and wellness. All information contained in this site is intended to be educational in nature. Nothing should be considered medical advice for your specific situation.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Welcome back to the Real Life Runners podcast, episode number 433. So what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to ice or heat? Are you supposed to use massage or compression? Do these things actually make a difference or are you just spending your money on things that don't really do much for you today we're we are continuing our recovery series with our third episode, and we're gonna be digging into things like. Cold baths, saunas, cold plunges compression, and massage. To let you know which of these things are actually supported by scientific research, which of them might help you but not be supported by scientific research and which ones you might want to just skip altogether, and we'll help you understand what's going on in your body, so that you can make the best decision that's right for you. So stay tuned. What's up runners? Welcome back to the podcast. I am excited to continue our recovery series because you now understand how important recovery is for your adaptation as a runner. In episode number one, we really talked about the science of recovery and what is happening in your body and how it's important for you to stress the body and then take time to recover because recovery is actually where adaptation occurs. Recovery is when your body builds back stronger during your workouts. During your exercise sessions especially, anything harder, your harder runs, your longer runs, your strength training sessions, you are actually breaking the body down and it is during recovery that your body's able to build back stronger and adapt to your training as long as you are giving the body what it needs and those main recovery pillars that we talked about. Number one is sleep. Okay? We can never, you can never out hack a lack of sleep. Sleep is always the number one thing that you need. All right? The other thing we talked about as a big pillar is nutrition. If you aren't fueling your body and not giving your body the proper building blocks that it needs, it's not going to be able to build back that muscle stronger than it was before, which is actually what you want. So we always have to keep those recovery pillars in mind. We always have to make sure that we're fueling the body properly, actually getting the proper amount of sleep and rest. Okay, that's number one. That was always covered in episode one. Go back and listen to that if you haven't. In episode two, we talked about the difference between active recovery and passive recovery, and which one's more important for the body. Hint. Or spoiler alert, if you want, don't wanna go back. they're both important. active recovery tends to be a little bit more important sometimes than passive, but passive recovery is also helpful. They're both, they both serve a purpose. They both have a place in your recovery. So you can go back and listen to episode two. And understand the difference between active and passive recovery. And today in episode three, we're gonna actually start to dig into some of these different recovery modalities. Okay? So these recovery tools to see, which one you should be using, because this is one of the biggest questions I get as a physical therapist is, should I use heat or should I use ice? Should I be stretching? Should I be. Getting a massage, like cold plunging saunas, like there's all these different things and lots of different marketers out there that's trying to get your attention and get your money for all these different things. Today, I really want you to understand the science behind it. I want you to understand what is happening in your body when you do these different things and which ones you might want to explore versus which ones maybe you know are a waste of your time or money. Okay? So today we're gonna be covering cold heat, compression, and massage. Those are gonna be the big ones we're gonna talk about, which, what, each one helps and when it might actually, interfere with your adaptation. And then of course, how to make your choices intentionally and not just go with whatever the trends you're seeing on Instagram and TikTok. So oftentimes we runners, if we are scrolling on Instagram, we see the pros getting into cold plunges or cold baths. Cold plunges have become such a hot topic now everybody's saying that it's going to extend your life and help you lose fat and improve your recovery and improve your nervous system and all the things. And so a lot of people are like, oh, they're doing it. I should probably do it too. And. It's important for you to understand that might not be the case, especially if you're a woman, okay? your body might adapt differently than a man, and your body as a recreational runner might adapt differently than what professionals are doing because professionals are training differently than you are. So it's important for you to understand, okay, based on your training and your experience and what you're trying to get out of these things, which ones you should be using because a lot of these recovery hacks maybe feel good. But they don't actually support adaptation. And in fact, some of them can actually blunt your body's adaptation, actually decrease your body's adaptation to your training, which is actually going to make your training less effective. You're not gonna be getting as much of a benefit from your training if you use these recovery tools inappropriately. So the key to all of this is really understanding what are you trying to recover from? Okay. Are you trying to recover from soreness or from inflammation or from stress, or do you actually have an injury that you're trying to recover from? Because sometimes these recovery tools can help you feel better faster, but they might actually. Blunt your long-term gains and your adaptations if your misuse. So you have, we have to really start to tease out and separate recovery for comfort versus recovery for actual adaptation. So let's dig into cold therapy first. cold therapy, this is going to include things like ice baths, cold showers, cryotherapy, cryotherapy, that can be literally putting an ice pack on something or there's all these fancy cryotherapy machines now. Like you can see these whole body cryotherapy machines that people love to put on Instagram. Where they go in with their bathing suit and they step into this, it almost looks like a space age, like dry ice with like the steam like coming up and it's all sorts of fun. But okay, what is actually happening with cold therapy? And right now I'm just gonna lump all of those things together into cold therapy. What is happening physiologically in the body when we apply cold to the body? So cold exposure causes vasoconstriction in the body. Vasoconstriction means that your blood vessels are tightening. if you guys are watching me on YouTube, or seeing this video, you can see how many making some hand signals, which you can't see on the podcast. But basically you have nice open blood vessels. When you are exposed to cold, those blood vessels constrict. So this helps to reduce inflammation and muscle soreness. It can, it also lowers nerve conduction velocity, which is the speed with which your nerve signals are being sent throughout the body, and that when you decrease nerve conduction velocity, that means that the signals are not going as fast between the brain and the body. Both directions. and this can decrease pain perception. Okay? So if basically when you have a pain in an area when you have injury or tissue injury in an area. That area is communicating to the brain that there's an injury and that is what allows the body to perceive pain. And so when you put cold on that area, that message is a lot slower getting from the injured area to the brain, so it can actually decrease your perception of pain. It's not actually. Changing the tissue injury itself, with what I'm talking about right now. But what it is doing is helping to decrease your perception of pain. The physiologically, what it is actually doing to that tissue is that it can reduce swelling and it temporarily dampens or decreases metabolic activity. All right, so basically when there's an injury in the body. The body kind of gets alerted like your body's, immune system gets alerted and that it causes inflammation and inflammation. Basically, there's all these helper cells, these fixer cells that get sent to an area of injury. And when I say injury, I don't mean it doesn't have to be a big injury. When you are working out, when you are exercising and doing hard things, you are creating micro tears and microscopic. Tissue damage in your muscle cells. That's what's happening. Okay? This is part of what we do. It's actually crazy when you think about it, right? But during training, you're actually breaking your body down. We're causing these micro terrors and this micro damage to your tissues so that when the helper cells come in, they come back in and they fortify that area and make that area stronger than it was before. So inflammation is actually a good thing. This is what we want. This is what. Helps our bodies to adapt to training. And so the only problem is when inflammation gets outta control, then it can become problematic. But if you're putting ice on it right away, you're actually decreasing and dampening that inflammatory response, which is your body's way of repairing itself. So is that something that you want to do? So short term. Whole therapy can reduce your soreness and your level of perceived fatigue. Okay? Again, perception. This isn't actually decreasing fatigue in the body. It's decreasing your body's perception of fatigue. So this can be useful after a race. Or in extreme types of efforts when your immediate recovery and comfort matter. So things like multi-day events, people that do the dopey challenge or the goofy challenge, where it's really important for you to try to decrease and keep that inflammation under control. You're not really looking for your body to adapt. You're looking for performance in that situation versus a 20 mile run. During marathon training, that is something you're trying to force adaptation onto your body versus if you're actually performing. If you're doing, say like the dopey challenge where you have a 5K followed by a 10 k, followed by a half marathon, followed by a marathon, you're not really asking your body to adapt that weekend. Your goal is performance. So using cold therapy during that weekend to help minimize soreness, minimize tissue damage, minimize inflammation so that your body feels okay the next day because you wanna go out and run again, that's a different story. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense to everybody. So what does the research actually say? The, some of the research shows that there is a modest reduction in soreness 24 to 96 hours after exercise when you use cold therapy. And cold water immersion helps subjective recovery. So your perception of recovery, but it's a limited performance benefit. Again, that performance benefit comes if you're doing something Like in the moment, like if you need to recover and feel better in order to perform again, that's where it becomes helpful. If you're using cold therapy after every long run in your marathon training cycle, then you could be actually blunting your body's ability to adapt. Okay. Then that's really what this other research, a couple other research studies have shown. Is that chronic use of cold therapy after strength training may reduce muscle hypertrophy, which is muscle growth and mitochondrial signal signaling, which by dampening inflammation necessary for adaptation. Let me say that again. Let. Use chronic use of cold therapy post strength training may reduce muscle hypertrophy, which is muscle growth and mitochondrial signaling by dampening inflammation necessary for adaptation. Because like I just said, when you train your body. you're creating this micro damage in your muscle cells. And so inflammation is what sends in that repair crew to help repair and help the body grow back stronger and adapt. And so if you're constantly just putting cold on it, you're dampening that inflammatory response so your body's not able to repair and get stronger. Okay? So in plain terms, ice baths may make you feel better in the short term, but might actually cause you to adapt less in the long term. It's something that you can definitely use strategically, but not habitually. All right. It's great for acute soreness after races or after a big training block. If, if you've got, went through a really tough week and you are just super sore, you might wanna get into an ice bath or take a cold shower or use some ice on the body. if it's really, if you're really noticing a lot of soreness because it might. Prevent you from continuing your training that week. I would also stop to tell you like, make sure you're also getting enough sleep and making sure you're fueling the body enough. Because if it's taking you longer to adapt, then you know, taking you longer than it should. Then you're either over training, you're asking your body to do more than it's prepared to do, or you're not fueling your body enough or getting enough sleep to actually, recover from those efforts. Okay. you wanna probably avoid. Cold therapy immediately after strength sessions or immediately after hard workouts. If the goal is muscle gain or adaptation, which that is what the goal of training is most of the time, unless you're like in a muscle competition, right? if you are someone that likes to take a cold shower after your run. That's fine for comfort. It's not required for recovery. So if you just like the cold, down here in Florida, in those really hot summer months when it is just so cold, I like to jump in the pool, but again, my pool is 80 something degrees. That's not exactly cold therapy, but it feels colder because of the contrast of the sweat in the outside air. a lot of times cold plunges and cold baths we're talking like 50 degrees and below for that. And most of the time your shower, I guess my shower here in Florida, I don't know about you guys where you are in the Northern states or in other countries. you might, your showers might be able to get colder than mine, so it can be helpful, right? It might make you feel better, but is it really doing anything long term for you? Probably not. Okay, so hopefully you understand cold therapy, what it does when you might wanna use it there. Let's move on to heat therapy now. So when I talk about heat therapy, I'm talking about hot baths, saunas, heating pads, anytime you're trying to increase, the tissue temperature of that area. So what is actually happening in the body physiologically. He so cold causes vasoconstriction, which is constricting of the blood vessels. Heat causes vasodilation, which is a widening of the blood vessels, so when your blood vessels get wider, that increases blood flow to that area and that improves and increases nutrient delivery, right? Because your blood is carrying oxygen and all sorts of other nutrients to that area. So when you improve blood flow, you're improving oxygenation of the tissues and you're also getting some of those nutrients to the muscles in order to kickstart that repair process. That's a good thing. Heat also helps to relax your muscles and helps to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is that rest, relax, digest, and recover and repair mode, which is what we want. And it also helps to promote tissue elasticity and pain relief. Now, this is something that I can tell you from my 18 years being a physical therapist. When I, when people come into my clinic, they want the heat, they always want the heating pads. can I have the heat and electric stem? I've had so many patients tell me that's the only reason they come, right? I'm like, that's fine. if that's what is gonna make you come to do your exercises that are actually helping you, I'll give you the heat because the heat isn't. What is really causing you to feel better? The heat does make you feel better. And that's one of the reasons that people love it because cold oftentimes, like people don't like feeling cold. People love the heat. that's one of the other things too, is that heat promotes relaxation and relaxation is good for your parasympathetic nervous system. It's helpful for you to actually, your body to click over into recovery and repair mode. Fantastic. Heat improves circulation, it improves relaxation. It can support metabolic recovery after glycogen depleting workouts. So when you're doing a hard training session, what you're doing is you're really depleting your stored glycogen. Glycogen is, the stored form of glucose. It's stored in your muscles and your liver and when you're doing a workout, especially running, but lifting too. But especially with running, like what you're doing is you're depleting that stored glycogen'cause you're using it for energy. And this can also, heat can also help to support your metabolic recovery. after those types of workouts, it can also improve sleep quality and your perceived wellbeing. Heat just feels good, right? Heat feels good, and that's a good thing. so what is the research telling us? the research is showing that post-exercise sauna increased plasma volume. Endurance capacity, so it actually impro increased your blood plasma volume, which is going to help lead to an improvement in your endurance. Very cool. This is one of the reasons why endurance athletes love to sauna. This is also one of the benefits of heat training, like when you run in the summertime. We talk about how running in the summertime is not really for performance during the summer. It's for performance later in the year because it's increasing your endurance capacity. heat exposure post training may improve mitochondrial adaptations similar to endurance training. Okay, so when you're doing endurance training, you're working your mitochondria. Heat can help with that basically, right? If you are doing heat exposure after training. and then another study in 2022 showed that regular sauna use. Was linked to lower cardiovascular risk and inflammation markers. So that's fantastic also, right? It's actually helping to improve your well heart health. that's a big jump, improving heart health, but it's lowering your cardiovascular risk markers, so that's great. So when should we be using heat? pretty much any time. There's only really one time that you don't really want to use heat, and that is immediately after an acute injury. So if you fall off the sidewalk and sprain your ankle, you don't wanna put heat on it because that's going to increase inflammation in that area. And your body, especially after an acute injury like that is. Going to be sending plenty of fixer cells to that area so you don't wanna increase, and have excessive inflammation in the area. But you can use heat between sessions on rest days for relaxation. a lot of people loved you, using heat packs just to help with lower back pain or neck pain. Shoulder pain. It's just part of the big. Ways that heat helps is because it just helps you relax. It helps your muscles to relax, it helps your nervous system to shift into that parasympathetic mode. Okay? But just make sure that if you are doing any sort of heat exposure, especially like saunas. or those kinds of thing, you always wanna make sure that you're combining that with hydration because heat exposure increases sweat loss, so you don't wanna dehydrate yourself in this process. So make sure that you're, hydrating enough when you're using heat therapy. All right, so moving on to compression therapy. Compression therapy are, is going to be things like compression garments, like compression sleeves for your legs, compression boots, there's NormaTec boots, all these different things. so all sorts of fancy new compression gear on the market. Basically, whenever you're using compression, what's actually happening in the body is that you are applying external pressure to the body. And that external pressure is going to help to enhance venous return and lymphatic drainage. What the heck does that mean? Venous return. So basically, blood gets pumped out from your heart through your arteries and goes to all of your. The different parts of your bodies through your arteries, and then that blood returns from those body parts through your veins to go back to your heart. That's your venous system. So there's your arterial system, which is your arteries that's taking blood from the heart to wherever it needs to go, and then there's the veins or the venous system, which takes the blood from those areas, from your organs and muscles and tissues and takes it from there and returns it back to the heart and the lungs. to. Clean it up, re oxygenate it, get rid of waste material, all that stuff. Okay, so that's your venous system. So when you apply external pressure to the body that helps to improve your veins, the, your veins ability to drain those areas essentially. Okay? Because your veins are passive, your arteries are active. so applying external pressure can improve your veins and your venous system and drainage. All right. when you use compression therapy, this also can decrease your muscle oscillation, which can reduce perceived fatigue again, reduce perceived fatigue, your perception of fatigue. it does not actually, the research has not shown. That it physically speeds up muscle repair, but it can affect your perception and your circulation. So those two things can actually help to speed up muscle repair. So it doesn't have a direct, even though it doesn't have a direct effect on muscle repair, it can have an indirect effect because of the differences in perception and circulation. All right, so in the research, there's a, there was a meta-analysis conducted in 2014. showed small but significant benefits in reducing soreness and improving perceived recovery. and then some other research has shown, again, minimal direct effect on performance, but positive effect for comfort and readiness. So it's one of those things that compression's not going to harm you and it could. Create, or provide a benefit. So why not use it? That's what I like. If you like compression, then I would say use it. is it worth it for you to spend$400 on fancy compression boots? You can answer that. If you've got 400 bucks to just laying around that you wanna spend, go for it. But it's, it's not gonna hurt you, but. Is it physiologically helping you? That benefit is probably minimal, but if you believe that it's helping you, then great. Like I think that we underestimate the placebo effect as well. I think that it's really important to understand that even though we might not have a physiological benefit of some of these things, a lot of these things do provide a placebo effect. And if a placebo effect helps you get better, like placebo effects have literally been shown to change tissue dynamics. It's wild, right? So if it helps you feel better, great. Go for it. As long as it's not doing any harm or any damage. So when would you wanna use compression therapy? it's good after long runs, or races for, again, comfort or swelling reduction. I know that. Kevin uses compression sleeves after his longer runs, especially like if we have a long car ride home. Again, helping with that circulation is good. And it just like having that external pressure. it's like giving your muscles a hug right from the outside, like giving them a little hug. and it just provides that nice pressure. It helps. This is why weighted blankets work also, right? Because weighted blankets help to downregulate the nervous system. That downregulation helps your body to relax, which is a good thing. so you can wear'em 30 to 130 minutes, two to two hours post training or longer if comfortable. compression is actually really good. Also, if you are someone that has a job that puts you on your feet all day, so like nurses or doctors or, people that are just on your feet all day. Compression sleeves are very helpful, because again, of that circulation, because it helps with venous return and those kinds of things, especially if you're a runner that's recovering from a long run the day before and then you have to go work a 12 hour shift. Compression sleeves can be a really helpful to, or compression socks as well. you can also consider using compression boots, and then combine those with breath work or mindfulness to make it even more effective because. Breath work, mindfulness, these types of things. We talked about the breath in one of our previous episodes. Your breath is so important, it's with you all the time, and it can help you shift from sympathetic into parasympathetic mode to help your body recover better. So pairing these tools with breath work and with more mindfulness techniques is going to help amplify those results even more. Okie doke onto massage, massage. When I tell people that I'm a physical therapist, so many times, they're like, ah, can you, I've got this knot in my shoulder. Can you help rub it out? Like just No, absolutely not. just, no, that's what I say. don't ever ask your massage therapist friend or your physical therapist friend to do that for you. Please just don't. Okay. And also physical therapists are not massage therapists. All right. keep that in mind as well. That's like kind of a pet peeve that we PTs have as well. Massage is definitely a tool that we use, and it can be an effective tool that we use, but it's not everything that we do and it doesn't actually provide as much. Recovery benefit as you think it does. So what does massage do? Massage can help to stimulate blood and lymph flow. It can help to reduce muscle tension. how does it do that? basically what we're doing when you apply pressure, we are activating the mechanical receptors in the body, which is just the mechanical receptors. So we just combine those words into mechanical receptors, which is fun. which is Touch, basically touch receptors. and this helps to calm the nervous system. Massage can, may also help to reduce cortisol and may help to promote oxytocin release. Okay. Oxytocin is like your feel good relaxation hormone. This would induce a physiological relaxation response. So if massage can help, reduce cortisol and promote oxytocin, it just helps the body feel more relaxed. All right, so what does the research actually show? The research shows that massage provides moderate benefit for perceived soreness and fatigue, but it has a limited impact on objective markers. Okay. So if we actually look at. Markers of inflammation and the chemical composition of what's happening in your muscles. It's, we don't see a huge difference, but we do see like subjective reports from patients receiving massage that they don't feel as sore. They feel less soreness, they feel less fatigued. and so basically what a lot of these researchers have concluded is that these improvements are likely due to. Nervous system relaxation, not mechanical waste removal. So if you've ever told, heard, or had a massage therapist tell you that they're flushing out the lactic acid or they're pushing these things out of your tissues with massage, that's not what's actually happening. Okay? What is actually happening is that the touch provides a nice calming response on your nervous system. and again, this is assuming that you're someone that likes to be touched, because there are people out there that don't. Like it when other people touch them, especially strangers, like a massage therapist on a table. when you're not fully clothed, that can be like a very. Stress inducing experience for some people. So for those people, this is not a good idea, right? Because one of the major benefits of massage is nervous system relaxation. So if you are tense in a massage because you don't like being touched by somebody, especially a stranger, then a massage would not be the best tool for you at least not. Someone else's massage, right? But there are tools like massage guns or self massage that could be helpful for you if you're able to relax during those types of things. So massage is ideal on recovery days. It can be helpful after long runs for relaxation and circulation. self massage can be very helpful. Those massage percussion guns can help to stimulate blood flow and help with muscle relaxation also. But just understand that. Massage is not flushing out or removing waste products from the body. Massages greatest benefit is helping to down regulate your nervous system. It's helping your nervous system to calm down. It's helping to shift you from paras or from sympathetic into parasympathetic mode. and that's going to help encourage full body recovery, which is a good thing again. I care right about the, like I was about to say, I was about to say who cares how it works, if it works. but I do, I care how it works. That's the really, the whole reason I'm doing this podcast. exactly. massage might not make you faster directly or make you recover. Quicker directly, but it helps your body want to perform again, right? Because it, your body's more relaxed, it can recover better. and then it just, things in the body work better when you're better, when you're more relaxed. Okay, so going over like. Here's all what all these things do. So then how do you choose what you want to use? Basically, you want to figure out, what's the purpose, what do I want to accomplish? And then choose your recovery tool based on that. So if your goal is to reduce soreness quickly, your best bet is cold therapy or compression. But just keep in mind that if you're using cold therapy, you don't wanna be using this all the time. Use it more for short term, not long term. Don't use it on a chronic basis because it can blunt your adaptation to exercise, which is the opposite of what you actually want. But it's great if you need to reduce soreness quickly. If your goal is to promote long-term adaptation, the best things for you are going to be heat mobility and active recovery, because again, you're moving things throughout the body. You're helping to improve circulation, you're helping to support your mitochondria. All of those are good things. If your goal is to calm your nervous system and lower stress. You're gonna use things like massage heat, gentle foam rolling, as long as you're not tensing up, right? Because those, we talked about foam rolling, like some, sometimes when you use foam rollers, that can really make your body tense up, which you obviously don't want. so those things can help to support sleep and help get your body into that parasympathetic state where it re, where it recovers better. if your goal is to prepare. For your, like a race the next day, or a multi-day event. Cold therapy can be helpful, compression can be helpful. this is going to help improve your comfort, help you reduce that soreness and help to control inflammation so that you're able to perform. and if you're looking for post-race, relaxation, massage, heat, stretching, those things are very beneficial. Just make sure that you're also pairing those with hydration, sleep, and nutrition, because again, sleep and nutrition, you cannot. Hack your way out of those things. Alright, hopefully this was helpful. if just to like sum some, summarize this again, and like figure out, okay, what do I wanna do here? if it's after, a longer run. You wanna always prioritize, fueling, hydration and sleep. And then if you wanna incorporate some compression, some foam rolling, some heat, totally fine. avoid ice unless you want that rapid relief. Okay. Now, the other thing that I want to just address before we wrap up is to help you point out that a lot of the things that I talked about, they do have a physiological benefit, but. A lot of the things that we covered today, if you noticed, I talked a lot about the nervous system because all of the tools, all these recovery tools that we talked about influence your autonomic nervous system, which is your parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So if you're using cold. That actually activates your sympathetic, but then helps you to slide into parasympathetic, it's like a rebound effect almost. Heat and massage is direct parasympathetic activation. So it's, it helps you switch over into. Recovery and repair mode directly. And then compression also can give you your body that feedback and help to relax the body and help get you into a more parasympathetic state. So that's really the goal of all of our recovery tools. The goal of our recovery tools is yes, to help our tissues recover, but. The main thing that a lot of these things do is help us to control our nervous system and help us to shift from sympathetic mode into parasympathetic mode where our body can actually do what it's supposed to do and recover. So some of the common mistakes that I often see people making, number one is using cold therapy all the time. If you're using cold therapy after all your workouts, or especially after your hard workouts, this again can blunt your adaptation to that thing. The other thing that I often see people do, and I've said this multiple times already through this episode. Is using these tools and gadgets as a substitute for the recovery basics. if you don't get enough sleep, if you're not fueling your body, if you are not refueling your body after exercise, if you are not drinking enough water, it doesn't matter if you're using heat or cold or massage or compression, you're not hitting the basic things. Okay? So I always want you to go back to those recovery. 1 0 1, the recovery basics that we covered in episode number one, because these other things really don't matter as much if you're not hitting the big rocks. Okay. The big rocks again, being sleep, nutrition, hydration. Okay. you don't wanna overuse compression, like if you're really, if it's really tight on the body, that can be. A negative thing because if the compression is too tight, it can actually be doing the opposite. It could actually be restricting blood flow in instead of improving your circulation and blood flow. So you don't want that. and again, just, you gotta hit the basics right, like that's really the biggest thing here. So I really hope that you'll enjoy this episode. that's what I've got for you today. And, I would love to hear from you if you enjoyed this. If you're watching this on YouTube, please leave me a comment below. Let me know what your takeaway was from this. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, I would love for you to leave a comment or a review for the episode, for the show, to help us reach more runners and help more people. And, come connect with me over on Instagram. Over at Real Life Runners on Instagram. And as always guys, thanks for joining me. This has been episode three of our recovery series, all about recovery, and overall episode number 433 of the Real Life Runners Podcast. Now get out there and run your life.