Whether you’re icing an injury to reduce swelling or cooling a sore muscle to tame inflammation, the approach won’t work, Reinl says, because icing merely slows blood flow to the area, it doesn’t halt it indefinitely. Once the icing stops and the blood flow returns to normal, whatever process you were trying to hinder will proceed again. The swelling will continue and the inflammation will start. The only thing you did was delay things. On this matter, Reinl managed to sway Mirkin, who wrote, in a foreword to Iced!, “Gary Reinl has done more than anyone else to show that cooling and
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