Post-exercise chocolate milk consumption, muscle soreness and recovery

Read more in our recent paper in Applied Physiology, Nutrition & Metabolism (Papacosta E, Nassis GP, Gleeson M, 2015).

http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/apnm-2015-0243#.Vbec5bOqqko

Does regular post-exercise cold application attenuate training adaptations?

That's a fundamental questions asked by many coaches and practitioners over the last year(s) (http://georgenassis.blogspot.gr/2011/07/some-thoughts-on-use-of-water-immersion.html). This concern is growing as more data is published showing that regular cold application might attenuate training adaptations.


What's new?
Yamane and colleagues (2015) asked their participants to train with wrist flexion exercises, 3 times a week for 6 weeks. Seven subjects immersed their forearms in cold water (10 ± 1°C) for 20 min after each training whereas the other 7 didn't immerse their limbs. Their results showed that regular post-exercise cold application attenuated muscular and vascular adaptations to this type of training (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25760154).

In a more recent study, 21 active males participated in a strength training program for 12 weeks. Post-exercise recovery included either 10-min cold water immersion (CWI) or active recovery. Their results showed that CWI attenuates the exercise training induced hypertrophy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26174323).

Points to consider
Although both studies provide novel data on the potential role of regular post-exercise cold water immersion on training adaptations, they are not without limitations. Their main limitation is that participants were non-trained and, thus, we don't know if these results apply to trained individuals.

Evidence against 
On the other side, Ihsan et al. (2015) recently showed that regular cold water immersion following endurance training sessions may enhance mitochondrial biogenesis (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26041108). As in the above mentioned studies, non-trained subjects were recruited and this limits the applications of these findings.


Take-home message
My opinion is that there is evidence that regular post-exercise cold application attenuates adaptations to training. We should acknowledge however that this information comes from non-trained males following strength training. Until more data in trained and possibly elite individuals are published we should be more concerned with the regular application of cold as a means of recovery.

Training load assessment in elite football players: should we trust what we read?

with Djibril Cisse  (Pre-season camp in Austria, July 2010)

As most of you know, training load (TL) assessment is vital to injury prevention strategy development. There are various tools of TL assessment, with the Rate of Perceived Exertion being one of the most popular. 

In one of our papers (Brito, Hertzog, Nassis 2015), accepted for publication last week, we analysed the TL of highly trained football players daily throughout the entire season. The fatigue index was assessed once per week for the same period. 

Our main finding was that training load was affected by a number of factors like previous and next match result and location. In addition, although TL fluctuated throughout the year the fatigue index remains relatively stable. Given the limitations of our methodology, we speculate that highly-trained players choose their pace during training in order to avoid excess fatigue throughout the season.

Practical implications

1) RPE-based training load assessment may not be as accurate as we think, and 

2) highly-trained players have the ability to modify their pace in order to avoid excessive fatigue. Although this speculation remains to be proved with more robust experimental designs, our data suggest we should consider modifying our strategies on fatigue & injury prevention.

The abstract of this study can be reached at 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279513407_Do_match-related_contextual_variables_influence_internal_training_load_in_highly-trained_soccer_players