Professional athletes have to look after their bodies. Many of them, like footballers and basketball players, earn millions of dollars a year to play their sport to the best of their ability. If they are injured and are unable to perform, those millions of dollars may soon stop flooding in. For this reason, athletes go to great trouble to ensure any injuries heal quickly. Recently, some of them have been using something very unusual to help.
No, it’s nothing to do with taking drugs – legal or otherwise. It’s something called cryotherapy. When you hear about it, it may even make you want to cry! Cryotherapy uses extremely cold temperatures to help repair muscle damage. At the same time, it can also improve an athlete’s performance and allow him or her to train harder.
We have known for a very long time that cold temperatures can help reduce pain. Many of you may have, for example, placed some ice-cubes on an area of your body that hurts or aches. Cryotherapy is more extreme than that. First, you have to take off most of your clothes, then you should put on a hat and some gloves and step into the cryotherapy chamber.
There, the temperature is reduced to at least minus 100 degrees Celsius. Can you imagine how cold that must feel?
People that have experienced cryotherapy say that it feels incredibly cold and it hurts. They have also reported that time seems to slow down! Once they step out of the chamber, however, the blood rushes back into their arms and legs and they feel fantastic.
Cryotherapy has become so popular with some sports organisations that it is used on a regular basis – not just to make aching arms and legs feel better, but to improve each athlete’s wellbeing. Some teams are known to have mobile chambers that they can drive around to different events around the country.
It may be some time before cryotherapy chambers are built in our local schools, but for the future professional athletes amongst our readers, stepping into the freezing cold to help make you recover faster may be something for you to look forward to.
We now have mobile cryotherapy to help athletes recover quickly:
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