Cryotherapy exposes your body to extreme cold, typically between minus 200 and minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, for two to four minutes. The cold triggers a cascade of physiological responses: blood vessels constrict, stress hormones shift, inflammation drops, and your metabolism ramps up to generate heat. These effects have made cryotherapy popular for muscle recovery, pain relief, mood improvement, and even weight management, though the strength of evidence varies depending on the claim.
How Your Body Responds to Extreme Cold
The moment cold hits your skin, your blood vessels narrow sharply. This vasoconstriction is your body’s first line of defense, redirecting blood away from the surface and toward your core organs to preserve heat. The process limits swelling in muscles and joints, which is one reason athletes have used ice baths and cold therapy for decades.
At the same time, your body treats the cold as a stressor, much like intense exercise. It responds by altering circulating hormone levels that control blood flow, fluid balance, heart rate, and breathing. These hormonal shifts are what drive many of the downstream effects people associate with cryotherapy: reduced soreness, lower inflammation, and changes in mood.
Muscle Soreness and Recovery
The best-studied use of cryotherapy is post-exercise recovery, particularly for delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS), the stiffness and pain that peaks 24 to 72 hours after a hard workout. A large network meta-analysis published in BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders compared multiple recovery methods and ranked cryotherapy first for reducing DOMS, with an 88.3% probability of being the top intervention. Cold-water immersion and contrast water therapy (alternating hot and cold) also helped, but cryotherapy showed the largest effect.
For muscle strength recovery, specifically jump ability, cryotherapy again ranked highest among the interventions studied. However, there’s an important caveat: regardless of the recovery method used, neuromuscular function generally struggled to return to baseline within 48 hours. That means cryotherapy can meaningfully reduce how sore you feel, but it may not fully restore your performance before your next training session.
Cryotherapy also showed a moderate ability to lower creatine kinase, a protein that leaks into the bloodstream when muscle fibers are damaged. Lower levels suggest less tissue breakdown, though contrast water therapy slightly edged out cryotherapy on this particular marker.
Inflammation Reduction
Chronic, low-grade inflammation is linked to conditions ranging from heart disease to autoimmune disorders, and cryotherapy appears to dial it down measurably. A pilot study in healthy adults found that each whole-body cryotherapy session reduced C-reactive protein (CRP), a key blood marker of systemic inflammation, by about 0.14 mg/L. Over the course of multiple sessions, average CRP dropped from 3.39 mg/L to 1.88 mg/L. Perhaps more striking, the reduction lasted up to nine months after treatment ended.
Earlier research has also shown that cryotherapy decreases pro-inflammatory signaling molecules while increasing anti-inflammatory ones, particularly in people with obesity. This shift in the body’s inflammatory balance is likely what underlies many of cryotherapy’s reported benefits for joint pain and chronic conditions.
Effects on Mood and Depression
One of the more surprising areas of cryotherapy research involves mental health. A systematic review and meta-analysis found that whole-body cryotherapy produced very large effect sizes for depressive symptoms (Hedges’ g of 2.95) and medium effects for quality of life. When compared directly to control groups, the overall effect on mental health was still meaningful, with a medium effect size of 0.76.
The researchers described cryotherapy as a promising add-on treatment for mental health problems, particularly depression, though they noted that larger randomized controlled trials are still needed. The mechanism likely involves the hormonal stress response triggered by cold exposure, which can influence the same neurochemical pathways targeted by conventional treatments for mood disorders.
Metabolism and Weight Loss
Your body burns a substantial amount of energy reheating itself after cryotherapy. Researchers studying a tissue cryotherapy protocol calculated that a single session extracts roughly 1,330 calories worth of heat from the body. After three sessions (about 3,990 calories extracted), participants lost an average of 0.54 kg, which closely matched the predicted loss of 0.52 kg based on heat extraction alone. The weight loss was driven almost entirely by thermogenesis, the body’s process of generating heat by burning stored energy.
These numbers are real but deserve context. Losing half a kilogram over three sessions is modest, and sustaining meaningful weight loss would require cryotherapy as one piece of a larger strategy involving diet and exercise. The calorie burn per session is significant in theory, but it does not compare to the cumulative effect of consistent physical activity.
Skin Conditions and Itch Relief
Localized cryotherapy has a long history in dermatology for removing warts and precancerous lesions, but whole-body cryotherapy may also help with chronic skin conditions. A study on patients with mild to moderate atopic dermatitis (eczema) found that those who underwent cryotherapy had noticeably lower itch scores the day after treatment compared to those who did not. This antipruritic effect suggests cryotherapy could serve as a useful addition to standard eczema management for people dealing with persistent itching.
What a Session Looks Like
Whole-body cryotherapy involves standing or sitting in a chamber cooled by liquid nitrogen or electricity. Sessions are short by design. The general standard is no more than three minutes per session and one session per day. You’ll typically wear minimal clothing, along with gloves, socks, and ear protection to shield your extremities. Partial-body cryotherapy chambers expose everything below the neck, while whole-body chambers enclose you completely.
Who Should Avoid Cryotherapy
Cryotherapy is not safe for everyone. An international expert panel published a detailed position paper listing both temporary and permanent contraindications. People with the following conditions should not use whole-body cryotherapy:
- Heart and vascular conditions: ischemic heart disease, uncontrolled high blood pressure, decompensated heart failure, peripheral artery disease, pacemakers or implantable defibrillators, and recent blood clots or pulmonary embolism within the past six months
- Respiratory conditions: severe asthma, advanced COPD, or active respiratory infections
- Metabolic and endocrine conditions: Type 1 diabetes, uncontrolled Type 2 diabetes with complications, and uncontrolled thyroid disease
- Immune-related conditions: cold-triggered immune disorders such as cryoglobulinemia or cold agglutinin disease
- Cancer: malignant melanoma, any untreated or progressive invasive cancer, or anyone currently undergoing cancer treatment
Temporary reasons to skip a session include fever, active skin wounds, pregnancy, severe anemia, and blood pressure readings above 160/100 or below 100/60 with signs of instability. A resting heart rate above 110 beats per minute is also a disqualifier. If you feel dizzy, nauseated, or generally unwell, that session should wait.