When I run In college (10 years ago, sigh), my team of physical therapists have been urging us to use any and all recovery tools, no matter how ridiculous they seem to our college students. We would leave the exercises with protein shakes and when we woke up on the way to the restaurant, the ice pack raised the ice pack. We serve three times a day to go to the training room for ice baths or ultrasounds, percutaneous muscle stimulation, or get the same time loved and terrible Graston massage. Foam rolling and mini band works are staples.
Since then, I have been talking about how coaches and coaches use recovery methods to make people better athletes, or simply bounce back from marathon training. When the Nice ROCC is a new handheld palm-cooling device that claims to improve athletic performance by rapidly accelerating muscle recovery, I caught my interest.
Even better, ROCC is produced in Boulder, Colorado, close to where I live in Denver. I had to land myself at the beautiful headquarters and see how this was made.
Super fast cooling
Photo: Kristin Canning
Palm cooling, also known as palm cooling or blood vessel cooling, uses hairless or hairless skin on the palms and soles of humans. This skin contains special blood vessels called arteriovenous anastomosis that contracts rapidly and extensively, and they are a good targeting area if you want to cool the core temperature. This helps muscle recovery and helps athletes work harder and longer.
When you hold the palm cooling device, it absorbs heat from the body and returns the cooled blood to the circulatory system, which quickly drops the core body temperature. Athletes can utilize these tools during breaks in the game or between representatives in practice. These devices are even used to help firefighters and military personnel fight thermal pressure. As a performance tool, palm cooling is supported by research. Today, professional coaches and players in the NBA, NHL, MLB and NFL, as well as tennis, soccer and Olympic athletes are using these products to gain an advantage during game and training.
NICE has established its own manufacturer of ice-free recovery tools with NICE1, a portable cooling and compression device, but ROCC is the first to get involved in cooling for performance rather than damage recovery. It’s a dense cylinder that weighs 5.3 pounds, but there are several factors that set it apart from other options on the market.
While most palm cooling devices, such as Coolmitt, require some setup (usually in the form of adding cold packs or water to a container), ROCC uses solid-state electronic cooling, similar to solid-state electronic cooling found in mini refrigerators. The small square inside the machine contains two different conductor metals that meet at the connection point. Breaking electricity to the junction triggers the Peltier effect, causing the outside of the square to feel cool and the inside of the white square to heat. (This calories are released through fans in the middle of ROCC.)
All of this means you just need to make sure you can use ROCC before you use it. It can be charged for two hours at a time. Once it is turned on, it only takes about two minutes to reach the proper cooling temperature (50-60 degrees Fahrenheit). Descent to lower temperatures can cause those hairless skin blood vessels to contract, allowing your cooled blood to pass through the body. The lights on the device will notify you when they are ready.
Push it
Nice recommends ROCC for anyone looking to improve their training or game performance, but you should keep it for at least two minutes for the best results. (The haptic timer vibrates every thirty seconds to help you keep track.)
