Give Your Basketball Players a Competitive Edge with Palm Cooling
In a tight game, every second counts – what if you could give your players an edge during those precious timeouts? Enter palm cooling! A game-changing intervention for courtside recovery. While other recovery methods wait until after the final buzzer, this technique helps lower heart rate and reduce fatigue so athletes can sustain the level of intensity necessary to win.
How does cooling the palms help basketball performance?
As the game progresses, thermal stress is a major driver of fatigue – it slows players down, clouds their focus, and reduces stamina. If players can offload this excess heat, they will perform at their peak longer.
Palm cooling is a surprisingly effective way to systemically cool down. The palms contain specialized vasculature called arteriovenous anastomoses (AVAs) which are direct connections between arteries and veins that support thermoregulation. When we are heat stressed, the palms can receive up to 10X more blood flow than other skin areas. Cooling the palms effectively cools the blood, which in turns lowers heart rate and reduces fatigue.
Unfortunately, you can’t just hold ice. The AVAs are sensitive to cold temperatures, and most people will vasoconstrict when holding something below 50°F – thus preventing the blood flow which is vital for palm cooling. The trick is to hold a device that is cool enough to ensure efficient heat transfer, but is not so cold that it causes vasoconstriction.
For effective core body cooling via the palms, a player should hold a device that:
- Maintains a cool-not-cold temperature of 50-60°F
- Provides a mechanism for continuous cooling and avoidance of thermal barriers
- Ensures excellent thermal conductivity to maximize heat transfer
We built the Narwhals to meet these parameters in a form factor that is easy to grab on the sidelines and lasts an entire game.
How do the Narwhals help basketball players during games?
Last year we sat down with Adam Ringler, the Strength & Conditioning Coach for CU’s Women’s Basketball and Volleyball to talk about palm cooling and why he brought it to his teams. In this interview he explained:
“We needed to find a solution to help, namely one or two athletes on our squad try to reduce their core body temperature when it mattered most – which is competition.”
By integrating palm cooling with the Narwhals, his players are able to recover faster during timeouts and return to the court with lower heart rates and more energy. Players report that palm cooling extends their time to exhaustion and keeps them fresher and dialed in longer.
I’ve always believed that defense wins games,” said Kindyll Wetta, starting point guard for the University of Colorado Women’s Basketball team.
“The Narwhals have been crucial in helping me maintain the focus and intensity required to excel on the defensive end, especially in those high-pressure moments late in the game.”
What palm cooling protocols are ideal for basketball players?
Anytime there is a rest period of 30 seconds or more, the Narwhals will provide a benefit. That includes: timeouts, after a substitution, or at half-time. While heart rate recovery happens quickly, longer holds (2-5 minutes) will offload more heat and provide greater benefits.
Holding the Narwhals in both hands is ideal for rapid cooling and especially in cases where the break period is short. In peer-reviewed research, cooling two hands resulted in 1.6X faster effect compared to one hand. That said, one hand is effective. You can hold one Narwhal while also hydrating, eating a snack, toweling off, or cheering for your team!
Beyond in-game recovery, the Narwhals may have a place post-game. Anecdotally, players have used the Narwhals after games during downregulation while engaging in breathwork. They report that this combination amplifies the transition to a calmer state.
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While all athletes face thermal challenges, for athletes with disabilities or certain autoimmune diseases such as Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), heat can often be debilitating. That’s why we teamed up with Alex Curry, the Director of Sports Medicine for Adapted Athletics at the University of Alabama, to introduce palm cooling to parathletes in both women’s and men’s basketball.
The Narwhals have made a significant impact on our thermoregulation model for our parathletes,” says Alex Curry.
" “We now have a proactive method for managing heat before it becomes a problem and extending our athletes’ ability to perform at higher intensities longer.”
The Narwhals are used by many D1 basketball programs, including South Carolina Gamecocks Women’s Basketball, and in the NBA and WNBA. They have even been used in Olympic and Paralympic basketball!
In the wise words of Adam Ringler, “Those three minutes when you are out of the game… those matter, those really matter.”
