Regularly doing ice baths and going to the sauna are often lauded as the things to do for recovery.
However, Lachlan Giles – elite BJJ athlete and coach, as well as physiotherapy PhD – doesn’t buy it.

Giles doesn’t do ice baths nor does he go to the sauna for recovery purposes.
He explained why in a recent conversation with Craig Jones:

When you do something like that, when you’re looking at the football teams and stuff… The research they do on those – if it helps, it’s very minuscule, like 1 or 2% in terms of recovery.

And if you rolled for one or two minutes less in your entire training day, it would probably have the same effect on training. You know, just a little bit less training.

Giles also emphasizes that yes, experts make sense in some cases, but the body is good at recovering itself:

You know, I think, obviously… Experts make sense. If you wanna have your training volume so high and everything is very strict like that…
You wanna do everything you can outside of that.

[But] look, we’re pretty good at recovering. Our body can recover quite well, it’s going to do most of the work.

So, just the general idea that you can do something external – which is going to be better than what your body naturally does – [doesn’t make sense].

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