Lindsay Berra

Gronkowski, who played nine seasons with the New England Patriots at around 268 pounds, has dropped 25 pounds since retiring at the end of his injury-riddled 2018 season. While hes only been away from football for a year, he says he got the mental break he so desperately needed.

Though Gronkowski never actually stopped working out, his fitness routine in retirement took on a new look, with agility and stability exercises he learned from former Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, with whom he will be reunited in Tampa. Gronkowski traded heavy weights for resistance bands. He dabbled with intermittent fasting, including mixing in a few 24-hour fasts. He replaced burgers and fries with plant-based protein shakes and organic veggies. He became addicted to Sudoku puzzles, and he made two cameos in the WWE, bringing his personality, power and general chutzpah to WrestleMania 36. And his year of leisure led him right back to the NFL.

I said it from the beginning that I wouldnt come back to the game unless Im feeling it, feeling healthy, and feeling ready to play, Gronkowski said <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B_VbOXvBTBk/" id="9532f379-23c7-3c40-ad46-dfad376cab7d"> in an Instagram post last week </a> . Taking a year off was hands down the best decision I made, not just in my career, but also for my health and well-being, and I would do that all over again.

But now, its back to business. In Fridays workout, trainer Dave Parise, CPT, MES, FPTA, plans on taking Gronk through half an hour of minute-long bouts on an Inertia Wave, a training tool that looks like battle ropes but is made of a rubber-like material that feeds energy back into the body, rather than into the ground. Gronkowski has been working out with the core-crushing tubes on his own and says after just 60 seconds, he feels like he has run a marathon. Sound familiar? Lebron James posted video of himself working out with an Inertia Wave <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a32279768/lebron-james-home-workout-battleropes-instagram-video/" id="b705964b-9904-399c-a35a-99e65effcc2a"> last week </a> .

Parise will give Gronkowski 20 to 30 seconds of active recovery between each working set, during which hell do pushups, glute bridges, planks, and other bodyweight exercises. Gronkowski will also do a post-workout Q&amp;A.

At just 30 years old, Gronkowski could conceivably play another five years in the NFLif he can stay healthy. The All-Pro tight end collected 7,861 receiving yards in New England. In Tampa, hell give Brady a third stellar pass-receiving option alongside wideouts Chris Godwin and Mike Evans, and with Super Bowl LV in Tampa next February, theyll all give the Bucs a chance to do what no NFL team has done before: win a Super Bowl in their own city.

Gronk Will Host a Live Workout on Instagram

Newly minted Tampa Bay Buccaneers tight end Rob Gronkowski wants everyone to know hes fitter and faster than hes ever beenand to prove it, hell be working out on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/gronk/" id="913ce05f-c85a-326a-a6f8-c30ad1a8784e"> his Instagram Live </a> at 5 p.m. (ET) today.

Rob Gronkowski Will Stream an Intense Workout Live on Instagram

LEBRON JAMES using ice packs on his muscles

Youve seen the best athletes in the world doing it, too. There are dozens of photos of LeBron James with his knees wrapped in ice packs and his feet in a bucket of ice and plenty of photos of Michael Jordan doing the same thing before that, too. Tiger Woods used to talk often about regular ice baths all throughout his comeback to the PGA Tour. Heck, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes recently appeared in a DIRECTV commercial sitting in a tub of ice.

You think youre doing it right, just like all those pros. But its been 50-plus years since Los Angeles Dodgers pitching legend Sandy Koufax first appeared in a 1965 Sports Illustrated photograph with his left arm submerged in a vat of ice, an iconic moment in sports. And since then, no piece of published, peer-reviewed research has shown definitively that ice is beneficial to the healing process. In fact, recent studies have shown the opposite. Ice can delay healing, increase swelling, and possibly cause additional damage to injured tissues.

Icing Isn't Helping You Recover From Injury

<h1> A Brief History of Where We Went Wrong </h1>

The procedure for injury management followed by most doctors, physical therapists and athletic trainers hasnt changed since 1978, when Harvard orthopedic surgeon Dr. Gabe Mirkin coined the term the RICE protocol. The acronym, which stands for rest, ice, compression and elevation, is still taught in medical and physical therapy schools today and is listed on the National Institute of Health website as the top treatment for both acute and chronic sports injuries. Dr. Rick Wright, an NIH grantee and a former physician with the St. Louis Blues, Cardinals, and Los Angeles Rams, still swears by it.

SANDY KOUFAX with his left arm in ice.

Ice is the best modality to control pain, swelling and inflammation, especially if you ice for 25 to 30 minutes so you get actual cooling of the tissue and decrease inflammation, as opposed to shorter periods where you can get a rebound response, says Wright, who is currently chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. There have not been well-done scientific studies that have crossed my desk that would make me say there was something I would use instead of ice that has been proven to work better. I have no plans to change any time in the near future.

Yet even Mirkin now disagrees. These days, he tells anyone who will listen that he was wrong about both rest and ice. He wrote the forward to Gary Reinls 2013 self-published book, Iced! The Illusionary Treatment Option, which has become the bible of the growing anti-ice movement. My RICE guidelines have been used for decades, but new research shows rest and ice actually delay healing and recovery, says Mirkin, now 84.

Yes, says Mirkin, if your muscles are sore, you can relieve that pain with ice. But the inflammation causing that soreness is actually bringing healing to the body; by icing, you dampen that immune response, he says. You think youre recovering faster, but science has shown youre not.

Why, then, did Mirkin conceive RICE? Possibly, indirectly, from a freckled-faced 12-year-old named Everett Knowles, who in 1962 hopped a freight train in Somerville, Mass. on his walk home from school. As he did, Knowles right shoulder smashed into a stone bridge structure, severing his arm. The boy was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital, where Harvard-educated surgeon Dr. Ronald Malt made a historic play: While deciding how to reattach Knowles arm the first time such an operation would be successful Malt put the appendage on ice.

Doctors began using the same protocol to treat all damaged tissue, especially in the sports world. When Mirkin wrote his book, he was simply reporting the anecdotal evidence of doctors who saw a temporary decrease in swelling and pain from immobilization, ice and compression. In 1978, inflammation wasnt even in researched literature, but everyone was resting, putting people in casts, wrapping things tightly with ice, Mirkin says. I didnt recommend anything on the basis of extended research. I recommended what everyone was doing at the time. And because RIC just wasnt that catchy, and a gravitational assist can help blood and fluid be reabsorbed by the body, Mirkin added an E at the end for elevation. It made for a nice slogan: RICE is Nice.

Remember when your school nurse told you to ice the ankle you rolled at recess? Did she tell you to leave it on for five minutes? 10? 20? Was it cubes in a bag or chips a towel?

Your school nurse was right about exactly one thing: No study can dispute that ice is the cheapest, most readily available non-habit-forming way to alleviate pain. But be warned: the pain will return once the tissue rewarms and the inflammatory response resumes.

Thats because the inflammatory response needs to happen. The three stages of healing for soft tissue injuries are now universally accepted by the medical community: inflammation, repair and remodeling. And you cant reach the repair and remodeling phases until youve gone through Phase One.

When tissue is damaged, the immune system initiates that inflammatory response, which a 2010 study published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal showed is necessary to heal damaged tissue and repair muscle. The body deploys its repair and cleanup crew in the form of macrophages, white blood cells that engulf and digest cellular debris. They produce the protein insulin-like growth factor 1, which is required for muscle repair and regeneration. The same study showed that blocking inflammation delays healing by preventing the release of IGF-1.

Ice delays this process by constricting blood vessels and allowing less fluid to reach the injured area, as demonstrated in a 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. This research showed that topical cooling delays recovery from eccentric exercise-induced muscle damage. Additionally, a 2015 article published in Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy showed that the narrowing of blood vessels caused by icing persists after cooling ends and the resulting restriction of blood flow can kill otherwise healthy tissue; that is, icing causes more damage on top of the existing injury.

And as far back as 1986, a study published in the journal Sports Medicine showed that when ice is applied for a prolonged period, lymphatic vessels become more permeable, causing a backflow of fluid into the interstitial space. That means local swelling at an injury site will increase, not decrease, with the use of ice.

This isnt just about serious injuries, either; its about the way you recover from workouts. Remember: having very sore quads because of a workout is different from a torn quadriceps only by degrees. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Strength &amp; Conditioning Research and another done by the University of Queensland showed cold water immersion after training ice baths substantially reduces long-term gains in muscle mass and strength by stunting the cell activity crucial for building stronger muscles. When you hit the cold tub after hard exercise, thinking you are reducing inflammation, youre actually delaying recovery.

Inflammation and swelling have been deemed the enemy, but only swelling is actually bad. Inflammation is a process the body uses to heal tissue, while swelling is a byproduct of that process, says Dr. Joshua Appel, an Air Force flight surgeon for the 306th Pararescue Squadron and chief of emergency medicine at Southern Arizona VA Healthcare System. When you recruit inflammatory markers to an acutely injured area, with that comes fluid. The body knows how to heal itself, so youre not getting too much fluid. But you can have not enough evacuation.

<h1> Losing the Cool: Alternatives To Ice </h1>

How, then, does the body clear swelling? Most of the particles are too large to move through the vessels of the circulatory system, so they must instead be evacuated through the vessels of the lymphatic system. The lymphatics, though, are a passive system, fully reliant on muscle activation; movement is necessary to propel fluid through the vessels. Sitting still with an ice pack creates the exact opposite effect. With an acute injury, you want to get the good stuff in and the bad stuff out, says Appel, who no longer uses ice to treat the countless ankle and knee injuries suffered by his para-rescue jumpers. The only way to do that is through movement.

Think about it. Do you think our hunter-gatherer ancestors rolled their ankles, dug some ice out of a snowbank, sat down and stopped chasing dinner? It's more likely that they forged on, and the movement facilitated healing. Pushing a sprained ankle may sound ill-advised, but a 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons showed that loading damaged tissue that is, applying force to it accelerates healing of bone and muscle tissue, while inactivity promotes aberrant tissue repair.

COREY KLUBER, Cleveland Indians

Moving sore muscles is easy. Corey Kluber, two-time Cy Young-winning ace of the Cleveland Indians staff, hasnt iced his arm since making the big leagues in 2011. Instead, Kluber does light-resistance exercises that target his rotator cuff muscles after he pitches, naturally activating muscles and moving fluid out of tissues damaged during his starts. When I was younger, I iced because that's what people did, that's what I was told to do, Kluber says. But over time, I realized I felt better not icing. The result: Kluber says he can warm up more quickly the day after pitching.

Acute injuries, of course, are more complicated. No, you dont want to squat 350 pounds on a torn ACL. But lets say you sprain your ankle. If your physical therapist clears you to stand on it, dont hesitate to do it.

If an injury is too painful or the area is too fragile for any type of voluntary movement, consider using a neuromuscular electrical stimulation device (better known as electrostim), says physical therapist and legendary mobility guru Kelly Starrett. Such devices (and there are more and more of them on the market) create non-fatiguing muscle contractions, allowing waste and congestion to be removed by your lymphatic system, which is driven by muscle contraction.

Starrett says seven years ago, he had a patient who had just had reconstructive ACL surgery. He rehabbed the injury with no ice at all, instead using an electrostim device. We had no swelling 24 hours post-surgery, Starrett recalls. Electrostim therapy generally involves connecting the body diodes that send light electrical charges to muscles, stimulating them to activity. Starrett says his patients range of motion and quadriceps control, which often take weeks to regain after ACL reconstruction, were restored almost immediately.

And because there was no swelling, there was no pain. We have to allow the body to excel at what it does automatically, which is heal, Starrett says. If youre icing, youre getting in the way, not facilitating.

In 2011, Canadian exercise physiologist John Paul Catanzaro coined the term METH Movement, Elevation, Traction, Heat as an alternative to RICE. In April 2019, two British physical therapists proposed another acronym in the British Journal of Sports Medicine: PEACE Protect, Elevate, Avoid anti-inflammatory modalities, Compress, Educate &amp; LOVE Load, Optimism, Vascularization, Exercise. All these ideas want you prioritizing movement over decreasing inflammation.

So why do doctors and therapists still use ice? Because they always have, speculates Chip Schaefer, the Chicago Bulls director of performance health who won six NBA titles with Michael Jordans Bulls. In the mid-90s, Schaefer says, it was considered progressive to put ice on every players knees after practices and games. But not anymore. You're always going to fall back to, well, I did this with Jordan and he got better, says Schaefer, rather than looking objectively at research. But we try to pride ourselves on following evidence-based practice.

Athletes are no different. Many, like you, have been icing for as long as they can remember and is a trainer really going to say no to LeBrons request for ice?

But healing is the name of the game, and faster recoveries happen without ice. More and more people are realizing that and you should too.

Because the meltdown has already begun.

THERE's A GOOD CHANCE chance there's an ice pack in your freezer. And whenever you have back pain or knee soreness, you reach for it. You do this because youve been told that icing reduces swelling, speeds up the healing process, and helps you recover from hard workouts that batter your body.

The Cold, Hard Truth About Icing Your Injuries

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Lindsay Berra

Articles written by the author

Rob Gronkowski Will Stream an Intense Workout Live on Instagram

The Cold, Hard Truth About Icing Your Injuries