Cryotherapy ICE Cupping Massage Course

What Is An Ice Massage?

Ice massage is a form of cryotherapy, which helps to reduce blood flow and pain sensations of the surrounding tissues. This helps to reduce inflammation and promote healing to the injured area.

What Is the Difference Between an Ice Massage and a Traditional Ice Pack?

It is a quick and effective way to ice an area in comparison to the traditional ice pack. A traditional ice pack is used for flatter parts of the body such as the thigh.

When Do I Use an Ice Massage?

Ice massage is best used for uneven contours of the body such as the elbow, ankle, knee, wrist, hip, or heel. The process of making an ice cup that can be used for an ice massage is very simple to use. It’s always best to make a couple of ice massage cups ahead of time and leave them in the freezer for when you may need them.

What does ice do for an injury?

Ice is primarily an analgesic, a pain relief tool and not an actual treatment. It won’t fix your injury, in fact it may slow down one section of your recovery system response – inflammation. When tissue is damaged, the body responds with a complex reaction both chemically and neurologically called inflammation. It is a significant part of the healing process.

Inflammation can be painful and disabling as it is being, quite rightly, protective of the body. But the reaction can be excessive and disrupt the balance between resting the injury and promoting movement, which is equally important. Cooling the area around the injury also reduces secondary cellular damage.

Simply speaking if we can control the pain effectively and promote early movement then ice is generally seen as a good thing. But we cannot stop the inflammatory response completely and we would not want to.

What injuries should I use ice for?

Ice is an effective management tool for a wide range of tissue injury.

Most commonly ice is used for acute soft tissue injury but it can be used to help manage pain and chronic inflammation also. An acute injury is one that has taken place recently (within 7-10 days) and soft tissues are muscles, ligaments, tendons etc.

Chronic inflammation such as the wide range of arthritis conditions may benefit from ice, especially if the area is currently suffering an acute flare up and is hot/warm to touch. But more often these may benefit from heat treatment (but that’s another blog!).

In conditions where we believe there is less or no inflammatory response such as tendon conditions such as tennis elbow, achilles tendinopathy etc ice may be useful but it is simply helping to relieve pain neurologically.