August 20, 2026

By: Dr. Alex Klein Most people treat ice as the treatment. You roll an ankle, you grab a bag of frozen peas, you elevate, and you wait. The problem is that the evidence for ice as a healing tool has never been strong, and the man who invented the acronym you learned it from spent the last decade of his career saying so. What has held up is something less satisfying and more useful: cold controls pain, movement drives recovery, and the two belong in a specific order. That order is where a good clinician earns their fee. What Cold Therapy Actually Does Cold works through a short list of real, measurable effects. It constricts blood vessels, slows nerve conduction, reduces tissue metabolic rate, and dulls pain. That last one is the reliable one. Every serious review that questions ice still concedes the analgesic effect, which tells you something about where the ground is solid. Where it gets thin is healing. A systematic review of 22 randomised trials covering 1,469 participants found little evidence that adding ice to compression has any significant effect. A 2022 umbrella review of ankle sprain management went further, noting that the highest-quality review it examined found no evidence for the effectiveness of RICE at all. Soreness is a different question with a better answer. A Cochrane review found some evidence that cold water immersion reduces delayed onset muscle soreness compared with doing nothing, though it rated the underlying study quality as low. Feeling less sore is a genuine benefit. It just is not the same thing as healing faster, and conflating the two is how people end up icing for six weeks and wondering why their ankle still feels unstable. The Man Who Invented RICE Changed His Mind Dr. Gabe Mirkin coined RICE in his […]

In the fields of sport and physical activity, intensity training has always been of primary importance. However, over time, recovery has become another important component of successful performance. The idea that the capability to restore and adapt is crucial is becoming increasingly popular in the community of athletes and other active people, ranging from professional teams to gym-goers. Modern technologies have been revolutionizing recovery methods, and red and near-infrared light therapy has been recognized as one of the methods that may help athletes in this matter. Contrary to a one-time fix, this technology has been recognized as part of a broader shift toward science-based recovery. Why Recovery Has Become a Key Part of Modern Training Recovery has become one of the most important components of modern sports training. Both professional athletes and recreational trainees have come to understand that improvement does not happen only during workouts, but also during recovery periods. Sports science proves that lack of proper recovery leads to fatigue, overtraining, and injuries. Professional sports teams spend a lot of money on various recovery techniques, including cryotherapy, sleep tracking, etc., as they know how important recovery is for maintaining high performance throughout the season. For instance, NBA teams include recovery days with mobility and low-intensity exercises to avoid fatigue accumulation. Marathon runners add recovery weeks to the training cycle, while strength athletes implement deload weeks to preserve their joints and nervous system. Even gym athletes learn how to recover properly to continue making progress. How Red and Near‑Infrared Light Are Being Explored in Athletic Recovery Light therapy, also referred to as photobiomodulation, involves bothred light and near-infrared light and has become a technology being explored by athletes. Both forms have different depths of penetration into the tissue, with red light mainly affecting the skin and surface muscles while […]