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6.8.2020 / Cold baths

With cold to morality

While reading Taekwon-do Encyclopaedia I was always more attracted to non-technical topics like philosophy, moral culture and other with overreach to daily life. I had enough techniques and fighting from regular nearly everyday trainings. It was sometime after my I. Dan test when I found chapter with activities that should develop moral culture of student.
One of it are cold baths. And because during that times I took everything in Encyclopaedia as great idea I started practicing it without question and continue doing so daily for most of my adulthood.

Citing from the book: „Cold showers and baths (naengsoo machal): By taking cold showers and baths or exercising on snow-covered ground in bare feet, students build tenacity and pride.“ Photo of barechested taekwondists in waterfall follows.

Cold procedures are getting popular in few past years with personalities and concepts behind it. Friends, students and patients are asking about my opinions so I spent few hours searching through and reading scientific literature and want to share few bits. I underwent thousands of applications and have feeling that it is helping me both psychically and with regeneration after training. But habit and subjective feeling is just a slight part of reality and as they say it is the easiest task to fool oneself.

Researches shows that cold water immersion procedures after sports like rugby (speed and collision) and basketball (jumps, speed, collision) improves subjective feeling after training. But also measurable parameters like height of jump and lower extremity isometric strenght is better during next day training than without procedures. They also say it is better to undergo it immediately after training than 3 hours after, but even 3 hours after training works better than nothing. And because we mostly use maximum effort and strenght in Taekwon-do, there is many hits and collisions and jumping is one of aspects Taekwon-do is renowned for we may get inspired from scientific results from above mentioned sports. I´ ve found only one article about cold water immersion for taekwondoists, but it was only in korean what is above my language skills.

I have to mention that procedures in these researches took 15-20 minutes what may be hard to do during normal after training showering.

Only negative effect was found in research with cyclists who did two trainings separated by one hour. If this hour consisted of also cold water procedure for 15 minutes their anaerobic outbut was decreased.

Contrast procedures (changing cold and hot water) are subjectively pleasant, but are not improving measurable parameters.

Other article assessed activity more real to practice for regular people. Group of people showered with cold water daily for 30-90 sec. After 30 days these had 30% less flu symptoms while being sick. So they got sick as often as control group, but did not suffer so much.

Psychological research with people practicing winter sea bathing at least two times a week showed that they percieve generally low stress and high well-being compared to non-bathers. There is no sea in Czech republic, but we still have cold rivers.

So generally by taking away a bit of comfort nowadays civilization offers us we train endurance both psychical and physical. Whine less about fact it is cold in winter and hot in summer, be a bit more healthy and regenerate better after training.

Summer is ideal time to start with this activity, because you get warm afterwards easily. Try at least 30 sec daily in shower, it is worthy of trying.

Wish you high moral culture and enjoy the cold.

Mgr. Martin Svitek, V. Dan, instructor of Sonkal and physical therapist


Literature:
1/ POINTON, MONIQUE; DUFFIELD, ROB (2012) Cold Water Immersion Recovery after Simulated Collision Sport Exercise
2/ INGRAM ET AL. (2009) Effect of water immersion methods on post-exercise recovery from simulated team sport exercise
3/ DELEXTRAT ET AL. (2012) Effects of sports massage and intermittent cold-water immersion on recovery from matches by basketball players
4/ CROWE, O´CONNOR, RUDD (2007) Cold Water Recovery Reduces Anaerobic Performance
5/ BROPHY WILLIAMS (2011) Effect of Immediate and Delayed Cold Water Immersion After a High Intensity Exercise Session on Subsequent Run Performance
6/ DEMORI ET AL (2020) Effect of winter sea bathing on psychoneuroendocrinoimmunological parameters
7/ BUIZE ET AL (2016) The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial
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