The ice bath beats the cryo chamber for next-day soreness

Delayed onset muscle soreness and a temporary dip in performance follow almost any bout of unusually hard exercise, and athletes spend serious money trying to shorten both. Cold water immersion, the classic ice bath, and body cryotherapy, the brief blast of extremely cold air in a chamber, are two of the most popular options, yet they had rarely been weighed against each other directly. Since cryotherapy chambers cost far more to access than a tub of cold water, knowing whether the technology earns its premium is a genuinely practical question.

The researchers ran a systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 randomised controlled trials with 214 participants aged 20 to 47.2 years, all physically active. They searched PubMed, EMBASE, the Cochrane trials register and Web of Science for studies published between January 1, 2002 and December 10, 2024. The two primary outcomes were relief of delayed onset muscle soreness and recovery of jump performance after acute strenuous exercise, with results combined using standardised mean differences or mean differences.

Cold water immersion was significantly more effective than body cryotherapy at easing soreness, particularly within 24 hours of exercise. By 48 hours that gap had narrowed and was no longer statistically significant. On jump performance the pattern flipped: body cryotherapy showed a small effect at 24 hours, which the authors themselves describe as fragile, and by 48 hours there was no significant difference between the methods. Tellingly, the soreness analyses showed low disagreement between trials, whereas the jump performance analyses showed high disagreement, which is why the soreness verdict is the sturdier of the two.

Plenty of research has compared each cold method against doing nothing, but head-to-head comparisons of ice baths and cryotherapy chambers have been scarce, so this pooling fills a real gap. It complicates the marketing picture around cryotherapy by showing the older, cheaper method winning on the outcome people feel most. The high disagreement between trials on jump performance leaves that question open, and the review does not address whether either method affects longer-term training adaptations, which remains a live debate in recovery science.

If post-exercise cold is part of your routine, this is a reason to think the ice bath holds its own against the far pricier chamber, especially for how sore you feel the day after a hard session. It is also a reason not to expect much daylight between the two methods once 48 hours have passed, since the differences washed out by then. The cryotherapy edge on jump recovery is small and rests on trials that disagreed with each other, so it is thin ground for choosing the chamber.