What Key Factors Stimulate My Body’s Response to Heat or Cold Therapy?

Over our last couple of posts we’ve discussed our body’s thermoregulatory responses in both the heat and cold. These are important to understand, as they’re responsible for many of the benefits of heat and cold therapy.

We also discussed in a previous post that the intensity of these responses depend in large part on how effectively we can heat or cool the surface of our skin. Today we’ll explore two key factors in the effectiveness of this stimulus.

It’s Not About a Specific Area of Your Skin

The surface of our skin is quite a large area, so when we talk about how we can effectively heat or cool it, you might say…where exactly?

Well, we mentioned in a previous post that the purpose of thermoreceptors in our skin was to provide feedback about the temperature of our environment as a whole. If so, giving any particular area of our skin more importance than any other would likely only reduce the accuracy of that signal.

Instead, in a concept known as spatial summation, our thermoregulatory system integrates the stimuli from all of the thermoreceptors in our skin (and our core for that matter) into a single cumulative signal. It then generates a global response to that signal.

Practically, this means that the effectiveness of various heat and cold therapies will depend on their ability to stimulate the surface of our skin as a whole, rather than any particular area.

It’s Not About a Specific Temperature

Have you ever wondered why your friend consistently outperforms you at one exercise, but can’t keep up with you in another? Have you ever experienced an identical heat or cold exposure very differently from one day to the next?

It wasn’t until relatively recently that we fully understood that people can respond differently to a given stimulus. And that it is our response to that stimulus, rather than the stimulus itself, that determines our adaptation to it. Contextual factors such as fitness, health, nutrition, psychological state, genetics, and various environmental stressors all contribute to this variance.

It may surprise you to know that in many elite sports, a player’s subjective experience of their training load is now used as a key monitoring tool.

Practically, during any given sauna or ice bath, more extreme temperatures are still likely to drive a stronger response. But you should expect differences in response for any given temperature between people and across your sessions. And it is that unique response that determines the benefits you’ll see.

Therefore listen to your body when it comes to how hot or cold to go. And importantly, resist the urge to compare yourself to, or compete with, others!

Are there any types of exercise that you personally find easier or harder than others? Are there any particular scenarios that you find make a given workout easier or harder than usual?

Hopefully these ideas give you somewhere to start when thinking about what methods might be more or less effective as a heat or cold stimulus. In our next post we’ll explore some science backed protocols to help you maximise the effectiveness of your saunas and ice baths.