For as long as there have been muscle pulls in sports, there have been ways athletes have tried to treat them.
Now there is a cool way to speed muscle recovery.
“People don’t like being told that they are being frozen, we really like to stick with hyper cooling,” Brandon Johnson, owner of The Locker, said.
It’s called cryotherapy and it offers recovery and regeneration, for anyone from a professional athlete to someone dealing with rheumatoid arthritis.
“The cold forces the body to go into a healing state,” Johnson said.
First, you step into a cryo-sauna, which is cooled by vaporized liquid nitrogen.
At the turn of a dial the temperature drops to more than 240 degrees below zero bringing your body temperature down with it.
According to the makers, that decreases inflammation in the body, which then increases healing.
It’s like an ice bath, but you only need 2 to 3 minutes and it doesn’t burn your skin.
“Well it’s only 2 minutes and it’s a completely dry cold and because of that reason there’s no chance for frostbite when you’re actually in the chamber,” Johnson said.
For someone like Tyler Schwartz, an MMA fighter who trains in multiple, intense sessions each day, it’s just what the body ordered.
“I used to sit in ice baths for 15 minutes and it was miserable and you come in here for three minutes and you feel better. I mean it’s cold,” Schwartz said.
“We see people from every walk of life from the mom that comes and just wants to feel good and have a little energy to that elite athlete because they want that extra one percent,” Johnson said.
In just two minutes, a person’s body temperature could drops to as low as 62 degrees.