Males benefit more from cold water immersion during repeated handgrip contractions than females despite similar oxygen kinetics

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effect of different water immersion temperatures on handgrip performance and haemodynamic changes in the forearm flexors of males and females. Twenty-nine rock-climbers performed three repeated intermittent handgrip contractions to failure with 20 min recovery on three separate laboratory visits. For each visit, a randomly assigned recovery strategy was applied: cold water immersion (CWI) at 8 °C (CW8), 15 °C (CW15) or passive recovery (PAS). While handgrip performance significantly decreased in the subsequent trials for the PAS (p < 0.05), there was a significant increase in time to failure for the second and third trial for CW15 and in the second trial for CW8; males having greater performance improvement (44%) after CW15 than females (26%). The results indicate that CW15 was a more tolerable and effective recovery strategy than CW8 and the same CWI protocol may lead to different recovery in males and females.

Muscle Cooling Before and in the Middle of a Session: There Are Benefits on Subsequent Localized Endurance Performance in a Warm Environment

“…During whole-body exercise that heavily relies on local endurance such as sport climbing, the beneficial effect of muscle cooling seems to be mitigated when compared with isolated contractions (2,16). For instance, previous research showed that all male subjects improved handgrip performance by an average of 44% after forearm CWI (2). In the current study, we used the same CWI protocol and observed only a 4% (nonsignificant) climbing performance increase, and not all subjects improved (Figure 3A).…”

“…During whole-body exercise that heavily relies on local endurance such as sport climbing, the beneficial effect of muscle cooling seems to be mitigated when compared with isolated contractions (2,16). For instance, previous research showed that all male subjects improved handgrip performance by an average of 44% after forearm CWI (2).…”

“…Precooling and Mid-cooling. Localized CWI of both forearms was used for both precooling and mid-cooling, after the CWI protocol that had previously demonstrated a positive impact on handgrip endurance (2). Subjects sat with their knees and hips at 90°flexion, with both arms placed at 20°shoulder abduction and 15°flexion, the elbow at 80°flexion, and slight wrist pronation.…”

“…All subjects gave their written, informed consent and were allowed to leave the experiment at any stage. Sample size calculations were determined using GpPower (version 3.1.9.7) based on the outcome measures from previous research (2,16). With power (1 2 b error) set at 0.95, a-level set at 0.05, and an effect size (eta squared) of 0.15 for differences in performance after CWI, the sample size was set as 15 participants.…”

Effects of post‐exercise cold‐water immersion on resistance training‐induced gains in muscular strength: a meta‐analysis

“…Therefore, the main limitation of this review is that the findings of this review are specific to male participants and cannot be generalized to females. One recent study demonstrated that males experienced greater improvements in performance (44% vs. 26%) than females following a CWI protocol (Baláš, Kodejška, Krupková, & Giles, 2020). These findings indicated that there might be a sex‐specific response to CWI.…”