that means the goal is to decrease the temperature of the affected muscles or underlying injured tissue, not just the skin. since exercise tends to cause muscles to heat up, post-exercise treatment may demand a more aggressive cooling strategy than icing after an injury.
“clinicians, practitioners and athletes alike often fail to understand that the magnitude of change in tissue temperature is extremely variable across different tissue layers (e.g. skin, fat, superficial, and deep muscle) and that skin and superficial tissues reach significantly lower temperatures than the deep muscle during cryotherapy (ice) application,” they said.
as for whether that bag of peas is the best choice when it comes to icing down an injury or sore muscles, anything that melts from a solid to a liquid will promote better deep cooling than a gel pack — even though the gel pack will cool the skin faster than a bag of peas or ice. keep the peas but pass on any of the engineered cold packs that have a greater chance of frosting your skin than cooling the soft tissue deep below the surface.
as for post-workout ice baths, the good news is they aren’t worth the agony endured largely because it usually takes longer than 15 minutes to achieve the degree of muscular cooling necessary to produce results. and for anyone who’s ever tried lowering into an ice bath, it takes everything you’ve got to stay the course much less spending even more time battling this unique form of full body torture.