My icing protocol

This is my icing protocol for an acute injury. It comes from years of experience working in professional sport, and this had the best results of any combination of icing I could find. It is brutal unfortunately, and sleep is interrupted unless you have an icing machine that comes on automatically.

All icing is twenty minutes on!

• Ice immediately when injury occurs

• Ice off for 20 minutes

• Ice again

• Repeat process for the next four hours

• Then for the next four hours, every hour on the hour, ice.

• After the aforementioned hourly icings, ice once every 4 hours until 48 hours after injury.

• Thereafter ice 3 times a day for the next two days and immediately after all activity.

• 4 days post injury, ice only after activity.

Make sure that you don’t put ice directly on your skin or it will burn, and don’t leave on longer than 20 minutes at a time.

Example: Injury occurs at 12 noon on Wednesday.

• Ice at 12

• Ice off at 12:20

• Ice on at 12:40

• Ice off at 13:00

• Ice on at 13:20 etc. until 16:00

• Ice at 16:00

• Ice at 17:00

• Ice at 18:00

• Ice at 19:00

• Ice at 20:00

• Ice at midnight

• Ice at 4:00

• Ice at 8:00am until 12 noon and every four hours until Friday midday

• Ice at 8pm Friday nite

• Ice at 6am Saturday morning

• Ice at 1pm Saturday

• Ice at 8pm Saturday nite

• Ice at 6am Sunday morning

• Ice at 1pm Sunday lunchtime

• Stop icing unless doing activity.