Basketball is notoriously hard on every major joint in the human body.
Teams invest in their players by helping them recover after games. In the past, this was often done with an ice bath.Now cryotherapy has replaced ice baths throughout the league. Ice baths do help sore muscles by reducing inflammation, but they take a long time to prepare and use. Furthermore, only one person can use the bath at a time, making it difficult for teams to treat everyone.
In contrast, cryotherapy is a dry treatment that produces all the effects of an ice bath and more. With local cryotherapy, individuals are subjected to extremely cold temperatures, as low as -120 F degrees, but as cold as it seems, most athletes prefer the quick cryotherapy sessions ( about 8 minutes) over ice baths because of the immediate relief it provides without the long-term recovery process that your body has to undergo after an episode of near-hypothermic conditions.
Also, unlike an ice bath, cryotherapy produces more of a fight-or-flight response due to the extreme cold. Many peer-reviewed clinical studies have documented findings related to the optimal release of endorphins, inflammation relief, improved mental state, and decreased histamine levels.
When it comes to an NBA player’s career, you can bet that they will invest whatever they need, to ensure that they secure their future. LeBron James and Stephen Curry use cryotherapy regularly for recovery after games and intensive training. In fact, now most professional team training rooms in the NBA, NFL, and Major League Baseball have some sort of cryotherapy protocol that they use regularly.
The Dallas Mavericks, of the NBA, were one of the first U.S. sports teams to use Cryotherapy. They used it during their 2011 NBA Championship season. The Dallas players swore by the therapy and even gave it credit for being part of the reason they won it all.
Are you ready to experience the healing power of cryotherapy? Call us to explore how you can make regular cryotherapy sessions a part of your path to complete health & wellness.
