The “Recovery Oil”

Cryotherapy, or “cold bath therapy”, is a popular recovery method among athletes. According to experts, coldness constricts blood vessels and decreases metabolic activity, which reduces swelling and tissue breakdown. “Ice baths don't only suppress inflammation, but help to flush harmful metabolic debris out of your muscles,” says David Terry, M.D., a runner who has finished both the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run and the Wasatch Front 100-Mile Endurance Run 10 consecutive times.

However, cryotherapy requires special equipment to perform, which is actually quite expensive. In view of this, some Australian scientists developed a new kind of post-exercise recovery oil which serves the same purpose. Instead of immersing oneself into a cold bath in a large tank, one can do the same with a recovery oil bath at room temperature.

To test the effect of this new recovery oil against the traditional cold bath, the scientists recruited a group of athletes to perform an experiment. They were divided into three groups: they had to immerse themselves either in cold bath, recovery oil, or just warm water (for control) after a hard workout. In the two days after the treatment, volunteers of the cold bath and recovery groups felt better and regained their strength more quickly compared to a control group, yet there was no significant difference between the cold bath and new recovery oil groups.

Now here is the most brilliant part of the experiment: the so-called “recovery oil” was actually a liquid soap added to a lukewarm bath as a placebo. In other words, the amazing result of the recovery oil is nothing but a placebo effect, or it works simply because the volunteers believed in it enough.

“We made sure that we put the recovery oil in the water in plain sight of the participants, and we gave them a glossy summary of some made-up research about scientifically proven benefits of ‘recovery oils,’” says Dr. David Bishop, a professor at Victoria University in Australia. Bishop’s doctoral student James Broatch led the study, which was published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

“I don’t think that we suspected that ‘recovery oils’ would be as effective as the cold-water immersion,” he admits. “That was surprising.”

This isn’t the first study to suggest that the brain plays a role in the popularity of ice baths. Research published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that the benefits of a post-workout ice bath for rugby players were biggest for those who had the most favourable impression of ice baths before the study began.

The researchers raised an interesting question: If a training aid makes an athlete feel better, does it really matter if the effect turns out to be in your head?

“In the past, placebo effects were thought of as a ‘fake’ effect,” wrote the researchers in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, “but today, the powerful performance-related outcomes associated with improved belief in a training program or a novel intervention is seen as real effects that need to be harnessed.”

Bishop added, “It is vital that coaches and sports scientists try and harness the belief effect in everything that they do with athletes,” he says. Even if further research finds that ice baths do have benefits for the muscles themselves, that effect may be no bigger than what you get from belief – so you might as well take advantage of it.

Regardless of all these, this experiment demonstrated one very vital truth: whatever you believe is working, no matter it is true or not, it will probably work. Therefore, one shall be mindful of what he is telling himself all the time.

REFERENCE: Broatch, J.R., Petersen, A., Bishop, D.J. (2014). Postexercise cold water immersion benefits are not greater than the placebo effect. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2014 Nov;46(11):2139-47.