How Cold is Cryotherapy?

The Short Answer is: Cryotherapy is Pretty Cold.

This question can become very complicated to answer very quickly. To answer this simply, at Leg Up Recovery, our cryotherapy chamber ranges in therapy temperature between -166°F and -220°F. It has four different therapy modes that incrementally decrease in temperature to fit the users tolerance to cold. The majority of our users can built a tolerance up until what is considered step 2 on the CryoArctic cryotherapy chamber.

The type of cold that is felt by a cryotherapy chamber is very different than that felt by a localized cryotherapy machine or a cryotherapy sauna. The difference between all of these is how much of your body is being exposed to the cold. A localized cryotherapy machine exposes the least amount of the user’s body to the super chilled air. Localized cryotherapy only allows small body parts like knees and elbows to be worked on. Cryotherapy saunas and cryotherapy chambers are the two forms of machines that allow users to receive whole body cryotherapy. Saunas do not enclose the user’s head within the machine and are normally totally by nitrogen. These machines can potentially expose the user to nitrogen fumes which can lead to asphyxiation. Cryotherapy chambers are the only true whole body cryotherapy machine available today. Chambers enclose the entire body, including the user’s head, within a chamber that is cooled to the desired temperature. The CryoArctic cryotherapy chamber is a hybrid chamber meaning that it utilizes both nitrogen and electricity to cool the main chamber. The reason that the CryoArctic is much safer than most cryotherapy saunas is because the user is never exposed to nitrogen vapor. The CryoArctic utilizes liquid nitrogen to chill the air and then the vapor is vented outside of the building safely. This leads to a more desirable treatment as the entire body is exposed to the cold temperatures.

Leg Up Recovery does not want to suggest that other cryotherapy clinics are using equipment that is considered more or less dangerous than the equipment that we use. We are simply stating facts that are easily found using public information and each individual user should do their own research before receiving cryotherapy from any clinic.