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The 4 Cs of Effective Palm Cooling
By cooling your palms, you can mitigate heat stress and improve training performance.
That’s right! Our palms, cheeks, and soles of our feet contain vasculature called arterio-venous anastomoses (AVAs), which are responsible for full body temperature control. When we are hot or working out intensely, these areas can get up to 10X more blood flow than other areas of the body. By cooling our palms, we are cooling our blood, which runs through our circulatory system and leads to several benefits:
- Reduction of core body temperature
- Accelerated heart rate recover
- Less perspiration and loss of electrolytes
- Better recovery between strength sets
To take advantage of our body's natural ability to offload heat via the palms, there are several parameters that are important to follow to ensure you get good heat exchange and avoid vasoconstriction (which would prevent you from tapping into the benefits!) We call these the 4 Cs of palm cooling!
Cool-not-Cold
Hold something cool, not cold. 55°F/13°C is the ideal temperature for most. Below 50°F, most people will vasoconstrict, preventing the proper cooling of your blood.
Good Conductivity
Hold something with good thermal conductivity to maximize heat transfer from your palm to the device. Think copper, not plastic.
Continuous Heat Removal
Consider a mechanism for continuous heat removal to avoid thermal barriers which will slow down or prevent the heat transfer. Think flowing water or heat pipes.
Contact Time
Hold the palm cooling device for 90 seconds to 3+ minutes depending on your use case.
In-Game Recovery
90 secs - 3 mins is ideal for heart rate recovery in game or competition.
Weightlifting
2 - 3 mins between working sets.
Heat Stress Mitigation
5-10+ mins to accelerate recovery when heat stressed (i.e firefighter incident rehab).
